…
The cold was with them day and night. Even inside the stables or the peasants’ houses it was impossible to get warm. They stitched clumsy mittens from the linings of their overcoats, but the mittens were thin and leaked cold at the seams. Their feet froze inside their cracked boots. The men tore horse blankets into foot rags and bound their feet like the Ukrainian peasants did. Their diet contained little to keep them warm, though Major Bálint tried to maintain the rations prescribed by General Nagy. Every now and then the peasants took pity on them and gave them something extra: a tablespoon of goose fat for their bread, a marrow bone, a bit of jam. Andras thought of the surveyor and hoped he was eating too-hoped the army was feeding him in Voronezh.
By day they shoveled snow from the roads, often not as fast as it fell. Their backs became hunched with the work, their hands crabbed from gripping the shovels. Along the half-cleared roads came trucks, jeeps, artillery, men, tanks, airplane parts, ammunition. Sometimes a German inspector would come to shout them into their lines and abuse them in his language of guttural consonants and air-starved vowels. News floated in like ash from a fire: The battle crawled onward in Stalingrad, killing tens of thousands every week; a strand of the Hungarian Second Army fought for its life at Voronezh, battered by superior Soviet forces. The men of the 79/6th shoveled their way toward that battle, though it seemed as distant as everything else. Sometimes they shoveled all night while the northern sky shouted a stream of bright curses. The men thought of their wives and girlfriends lying in warm beds in Budapest, their legs bare and smooth, their breasts asleep in the midwinter dark, their hands folded and fragrant like love letters. They repeated the names of those distant women in their minds, the twist of longing never abating, even when the names became abstractions and the men had to wonder whether the women really still existed, if they could be said to exist when their existence was taking place somewhere so far distant, beyond the granite grin of the Carpathians, across the flat cold plains of Hungarian winter. Klara was the sound of a shovel hitting frozen snow, the scrape of a blade against frozen ground. Andras told himself that if he could only clear this road, if he could only open the way for the trucks to speed toward the Eastern Front, then the war would flow in that direction and pool there, far away from Hungary and Klara and Tamás.
But in mid-January something went wrong. The traffic, which until that point had largely flowed in the direction of Russia, began to run the other way. At first it was just a trickle: a few truckloads of provisions, a few companies of foot soldiers in jeeps. After a while it became a steady stream of men and vehicles and weaponry. Then, in late January, it became a deluge, and the river of it turned red with blood. There were Red Cross ambulances full of dead and horribly injured men, casualties of the battle that had raged in Stalingrad for five months, since August of 1942. One night the news came that the Hungarian Second Army, along with the thousands of work servicemen who had been attached to it, had suffered a final and brutal defeat at Voronezh. It came just as Andras received his ration of bread with its smear of margarine. As hungry as he was, he gave his ration to József and sat down in a corner of the barn where they were quartered that night. They were sharing the barn with two dozen black-faced sheep whose wool had been allowed to grow long for the winter. The sheep nosed into the stall where Andras had sequestered himself; they lay their dusty bodies down in the hay, made their shuddering cries, snuffled at each other with their black velvet noses. It wasn’t just the surveyor, Szolomon, that Andras was thinking of; it was Mátyás, who had at one time been attached to the Hungarian Second Army. If he had lived through the last year’s winter, he might have been one of the fifty thousand posted at Voronezh. Andras imagined his parents getting the dreaded news at last, his mother standing in the kitchen of their Debrecen apartment with a telegram in her hand, his father crumpled in his chair like an empty glove. Andras had been a father for only fourteen months, but he knew what it would mean to lose a son. He thought of Tamás, of the familiar whorl of his hair, the speed of his heartbeat, the folded landscape of his body. Then he put his face into his knees and saw Mátyás standing on the rail of a Budapest streetcar, his blue shirt fluttering.
He swallowed the knot of coarse rope that had lodged itself in his throat, and drew an arm across his eyes. He would not mourn, he told himself. Not until he knew.
The river of blood continued, and before long it swept up Andras and József and the rest of the 79/6th and carried them west, back toward Hungary. Fragments of labor-service companies drifted through, men who had reached nightmarish states of emaciation. The 79/6th, whose rations had been steady, carried food each night to forced laborers who were nearly dead, whose commanders had abandoned them, who had no work now but to flee in the direction of home. They received more news of what had happened at Stalingrad-the bombing that had turned every block of the city to rubble, its buildings to a forest of broken brick and concrete; the surrounding of the German Sixth Army at the center of the city, its commander, General Paulus, hidden in a basement while the battle raged around him; the downing of the few Luftwaffe supply flights; then the Soviet Army pounding through to retake control of the Don bend, and to prevent the German Fourth from advancing to rescue the surrounded Sixth. No one knew how many had been killed-two hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? A million?-or how many were dying still, of cold and starvation and untreated wounds, there at the dead center of winter, on the dark and barren steppes. The Soviets were said to be chasing the remnants of the Hungarian Army back across the plains. In the midst of his own fear, his own flight, Andras felt a fierce satisfaction. The German Sixth had failed to take the oil fields around Grozny; they had failed to take the city that carried Stalin’s name. Those defeats might beget others. What had failed might continue to fail. It was a terrible thing to take pleasure in, Andras knew-the fate of Hungarian companies and labor servicemen were tied to the fate of the Wehrmacht, and in any case these were human beings who were dying, whatever their nationality. But Germany had to be defeated. And if it could be defeated while Hungary remained a sovereign state, then the Jews of Hungary might never have to live under Nazi rule.
The confusion of the retreat toward Hungary begat strange convergences, foldings of fate that arose from the mingling of dozens of labor-service companies. Again and again they came across men they knew from the far-off life before the war. One night they quartered with a group of men from Debrecen, among whom were several old schoolmates of Tibor’s. Another night they encountered a group from Konyár itself, including the baker’s son, the elder brother of Orsolya Korcsolya. A third night, stranded in a March blizzard, Andras found himself sharing a corner of a granary-turned-infirmary with the managing editor of the Magyar Jewish Journal, the man who had been Frigyes Eppler’s colleague and adversary. The man was scarcely recognizable, so stripped down by cold and hunger as to seem only the wire armature upon which his former self had been built; no one could have imagined that this ravenous thin-armed man, his eyes glittering with fever, had once been a bellicose editor in an Irish tweed jacket.
The managing editor had news of Frigyes Eppler, who had lost his job after the military police had found a file of incriminating documents in his office, a set of papers rumored to have connected him to a black-market operation at Szentendre, of all places. Not long afterward, Eppler had been conscripted into the Munkaszolgálat; no one had heard from him since, or at least not as far as the managing editor knew. He himself had been called up into a different company a few weeks later. Now the managing editor was part of a group of sick and wounded men whose commander had left them in the granary to starve or to succumb to fever. Major Bálint had ordered the 79/6th to tend to the sick men-to bring them food and water and change the dirty makeshift dressings on their wounds. As Andras performed these duties for the managing editor, he learned the fate of another member of their company, a man whose story was so grim that he had earned the nickname of Uncle Job. This man, the editor told him, had onc
e been married to a beautiful woman, a former actress, with whom he’d had a child; it was rumored that he had lived in Paris, where he had run a grand theater at the center of town. Before the war he had been forced to return to Budapest, where, for a brief time, he had taken over the directorship of the Opera. It was in Budapest that his wife had become ill and died. Soon afterward, the man, already suffering from tuberculosis, had been conscripted into the labor service-made an example of, to be certain-and had been placed into service with the labor company that the editor would join sometime later. Last fall they had been sent through the waystation of the Royal Hungarian Field Gendarmerie at Staryy Oskol, where they had been interrogated and beaten and robbed of everything they had brought with them. The Hungarian Field Gendarmerie knew who this great man was, this former luminary of the theater; they stood him up in front of the others and beat him with their rifles, and then they produced a telegram in which it was reported that the man’s son had died of measles. The telegram had been sent by the boy’s aunt to a relative in Szeged; it had been intercepted in Budapest and forwarded all the way to Staryy Oskol apparently for the express torment of this gentleman. The man begged them to kill him, too, but they left him alone with the rest of the battalion, and the next day they were all sent east again.
“But what happened to him?” Andras asked, his hands on his knees, looking into the hollowed-out eyes of the managing editor. “Did he die at Voronezh?”
“That’s the pity of it,” the editor said. “He never did die, though he kept trying. He volunteered to clear land mines. Ran into the line of fire every chance he got. Survived it all. Even the consumption couldn’t kill him.”
“How did you leave him? Where did you last see him?”
“He’s there in the corner, where your friend is sitting now.”
Andras looked over his shoulder. József had knelt to give water to a man who lay propped on a pile of folded grain sacks; the man turned his head away, and through the veil of illness and emaciation Andras recognized Zoltán Novak.
“I know him,” Andras told the editor.
“Of course. Who didn’t? He was well known.”
“Personally, I mean.”
“Go pay your regards, then.” He put a hand to Andras’s chest and gave him a push in the man’s direction, the gesture like a dim ghost of his old energy, his old vehemence.
Andras approached József and the man supported on the grain sacks. He caught József’s eye and beckoned him into a corner.
“That’s Zoltán Novak,” Andras whispered.
József wrinkled his forehead and glanced back toward the man. “Novak?” he said. “Are you certain?”
Andras nodded.
“God help us,” József said. “He’s nearly dead.”
But the man raised his head from the grain sacks and looked at Andras and József.
“I’ll be right back,” József said.
“Give me water,” said Novak, his voice a raw whisper in his throat.
“I’ll go to him,” Andras said.
“Why?”
“He knows me.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’ll be a comfort,” József said.
But Andras went to kneel on the floor beside Novak, who raised himself an inch or two on the folded sacks, his eyes closed, his breath rattling like the stroked edge of a comb.
“Give me water, there,” he said again.
Andras raised his canteen and Novak drank. When he was done, he cleared his throat and looked at Andras. A slow heat came to his expression, a faint flushing of the skin around the eyelids. He pushed himself up onto his elbows.
“Lévi,” he said, and shook his head. He made three burrs of noise that might have been consternation or laughter. The exertion seemed to have drained him. He lay back again and closed his eyes. It was a long time before he spoke again, and when he did, the words came slowly and with effort. “Lévi,” he said. “I must have died, thank God. I’ve died and gone down to Gehenna. And here you are with me, also dead, I hope.”
“No,” Andras said. “Still alive and here in Ukraine, both of us.”
Novak opened his eyes again. There was a softness in his gaze, a complicated pity that did not exclude himself but was not focused upon himself alone; it seemed to take in all of them, Andras and József and the editor and the other sick and dying men and the laborers who were bringing them water and tending their wounds.
“You see how it stands with me,” Novak said. “Maybe it gives you some satisfaction to see me like this.”
“Of course not, Novak-úr. Tell me what I can do for you.”
“There’s only one thing I want,” Novak said. “But I can’t ask for it without making a murderer of you.” He gave a half smile, pausing again to catch his breath. Then he coughed painfully and turned onto his side. “I’ve wished to die for months. But I’m quite strong, as it turns out. Isn’t that a lovely thing? And I’m too much of a coward to take my own life.”
“Are you hungry?” Andras asked. “I’ve got some bread in my knapsack.”
“Do you think I want bread?”
Andras glanced away.
“That other man’s her nephew, isn’t he,” Novak said. “He resembles her.”
“I’d like to think she’s a good deal better looking than that,” Andras said.
Novak coughed out a laugh. “You’re right, there,” he said, and then shook his head. “Andras Lévi. I hoped I wouldn’t see you again after that day at the Opera.”
“I’ll go away if you want.”
Novak shook his head again, and Andras waited for him to say something more. But he had exhausted himself with speaking; he fell into a shallow open-mouthed sleep. Andras sat with him as he struggled for breath. Outside, the wind was shrill with the force of the blizzard. Andras put his head on his arm and fell asleep, and when he woke it had grown dark inside the granary. No one had a candle; those who still had flashlights hadn’t had batteries for months. The sound and smell of sick men closed in around him like a close-woven veil. Novak was wide awake now and looking intently at him, his breathing more labored than before. Each intake of breath sounded as though he were building a complicated structure from inappropriate materials with broken tools; each exhalation was the defeated collapse of that ugly and imbalanced structure. He spoke again, so quietly that Andras had to lean close to hear.
“It’s all right now,” he was saying. “Everything’s all right.”
It was unclear whether he meant to reassure Andras or himself or both of them at once; he seemed almost to be addressing someone who wasn’t present, though his eyes were fixed on Andras in the darkness. Soon he went quiet and fell asleep again. Andras stayed beside him all night as he wandered in and out of sleep, and the next day he gave Novak his ration of bread. Novak couldn’t eat it dry, but Andras mashed it into crumbs and mixed it with melted snow. They spent three days that way, Novak drifting awake and sleeping, Andras giving him small measures of food and water, until the weather had cleared and the snow had melted enough for the 79/6th to go on again toward the border. When Bálint announced that the men would move out the following morning, Andras’s relief was cut with dismay. He begged a moment’s conference with the major; they couldn’t leave the other men there to die.
“How do you propose to move them, Serviceman?” Bálint asked, his tone stern, though not unkind. “We don’t have ambulances. We don’t have materials for litters. And we can’t possibly stay here.”
“We can improvise something, sir.”
Bálint shook his shaggy head. “These men are better off inside. The medical corps will be along in a few days. Those who can be moved will be moved then.”
“Some of them will be dead by then,” Andras said.
“In that case, Lévi, dragging them into the cold and snow won’t save them.”
“One of those men saved my life when I was a student in Paris. I can’t abandon him.”
“Listen to me,” Bálint said, his large e
arth-colored eyes steady on Andras’s. “I have a son and daughter at home. The others are husbands and fathers, too, many of them. We’re young men. We’ve got to get home alive. That’s the principle by which I’ve commanded this company since we turned back. We’re still a hundred kilometers from the border, five days’ walk at least. If we carry sick men with us we’ll slow the entire company. We could lose our lives.”
“Let me stay, then, sir.”
“That’s not in my orders.”
“Let me.”
“No!” Bálint said, angry now. “I’ll march you out at gunpoint if I have to.”
But in the end there was no need for a show of force. Zoltán Novak, former husband and father, former director of the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt and the Budapest Operaház, the man Klara Morgenstern had loved for eleven years and in some measure must have loved still, fell asleep that night and did not wake again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN. An Escape
The InvisibleBridge Page 67
