Those things Andras remembered in detail. More confusing was what had passed between then and now. Through the haze of his fever he tried and tried to remember what had happened to Tibor. He remembered, weeks or months earlier, fleeing with Tibor and József along a road west of Trebišov on a bright day, pursued by the sound of Russian tanks and Russian gunfire. They’d been separated from their company; József had been sick and couldn’t keep up. German jeeps and armored cars shot along the road beside them. Approaching from behind, an earthquake: Russians in their rolling fortresses, guns blazing. As they fled along the road, József had stumbled into the path of a German armored car. He’d been thrown into a ditch, his leg twisted into an angle that was-the fevered Andras grasped in darkness for the word-unrealistic. It was unrealistic; it did not represent life. A leg did not bend in that way, or in that direction, in relation to a man’s body. When Andras reached him, József was open-eyed, breathing fast and shallow; he seemed in a state of strange exultation, as though in one quick stroke he’d been vindicated on a point he’d argued fruitlessly for years. Tibor bent beside him and put a careful hand to the leg, and József released an unforgettable sound: a grating three-toned shriek that seemed to crack the dome of the sky. Tibor drew back and gave Andras a look of despair: He was out of morphine, the supplies he’d hoarded in Budapest exhausted by now. Moments later, it seemed, an olive-colored van had appeared, Austrian Wehrmacht flags fluttering at its bumpers, a red cross painted on its side. Andras tore the yellow armband from his sleeve, from József’s, from Tibor’s; now they were just three men in a ditch, without identity. Austrian medics arrived, judged them all in need of immediate medical care, and loaded them into the van. Soon they were moving along the road at an incredible rate of speed-still fleeing before the Russians, Andras imagined. Then there was a burst of deafening noise, a brilliant explosion. The canvas of the van tore away, floor became ceiling, a tire traced an arc against a backdrop of clouds. A jolt of impact. A thrumming silence. From somewhere close by, József calling for his father, of all people. Tibor stood unharmed amid dry cornstalks, dusting snow from his sleeves. Andras, a wild white pain abloom in his side, lay in a furrow of the field and stared at the sky, an impossibly high milk blue stretching forever above him. In his memory a cloud took the shape of the Panthéon, a suggestion of columns and a dome. A moment later that milky blue, that dome, disappeared into an enfolding darkness.
Later he had opened his eyes to a vision so blinding he was certain he had died. Snow-white walls, snow-white bedstead, snow-white curtains, snow-white sky outside the window. He came to understand that he was lying on a hospital cot, under the excruciating weight of a thin cotton blanket. A doctor with a Yugoslav name, Dobek, removed a bandage from Andras’s side and examined a red-toothed wound that extended from beneath his lowest rib to just above his navel. The sight of it brought on a wave of nausea so deep that Andras looked around in panic for a bedpan, and the motion called forth a shearing pain inside the wound. The doctor begged Andras not to move. Andras understood, though the admonition came in a language he didn’t know. He lay back and fell into a dreamless sleep. When he woke, Tibor was sitting in a chair beside the cot, his glasses unbroken, his hair clean, his face washed, his labor-service rags exchanged for cotton pajamas. Andras had been wounded, he explained; the medical van had hit a mine. He’d had to have emergency surgery. His spleen had been damaged, his small intestine severed near the terminal ileum; but all had been repaired, and he was recovering well. Where were they? In Kassa, Slovakia, in a Catholic hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, under the care of Slovak nuns. And where was József? Recovering in a neighboring ward; his leg had been shattered, and he’d had a complicated surgery.
They lay in that Slovak hospital, he and József, for an indeterminate number of weeks; he lay there recovering from his terrible wound, and József from his complex fracture, while a war raged nearby. Tibor came and went. He was serving the nuns, the doctors, working at their side, assisting in surgery, triaging new patients who came in. He was exhausted, grim with the sight of bullet- and bomb-ravaged bodies, but there was a calm purpose in his expression: He was doing what he’d been trained to do. The Russians were making progress, he told Andras, slowly but steadily. If the hospital could survive the onslaught of the battle, they might all be safe soon.
But then the Nazis arrived to clear the hospital. Evacuate was the word they used, though the meaning wasn’t the same for everyone. In that place where no patient had been asked his religion, no distinction made between gentile and Jew, the Jews were now identified and herded into a corridor. Andras and Tibor supported József between them, his leg unwieldy in its plaster cast, and the three of them were marched to a train and loaded onto a boxcar. Again they rolled off into the unknown, south and west this time, toward Hungary.
For nearly a week they traveled across the country. Tibor gleaned what he could about their location from the shouts he overheard when the train stopped, or from the little he could see from the tiny window in the bolted door. They were at Alsózsolca, then at Mezökövesd, then at Hatvan; there was a moment of wild hope that they might turn south toward Budapest, but the train rolled onward toward Vác. They skirted the border near Esztergom and traveled for a time along the ice-choked Danube, then through Komárom and Győr and Kapuvár, toward the western border. All that way, Tibor had cared for Andras and József, preserving their delicate recovery. When Andras vomited on the boxcar floor, Tibor cleaned him, and when József had to use the can at the back of the car, Tibor walked him there and helped him. He ministered to the other patients, too, many of whom were too sick to understand their luck. But there was little he could do. There was no food, no water, not a clean bandage or a dose of medicine. At night Tibor lay beside Andras for warmth, and whispered in Andras’s ear as if to keep them both from losing their minds. Let me tell you a story, Tibor said, as if Andras were the son Tibor had left behind. Once there was a man who could speak to animals. Here is what the man said. Here is what the animals said. A vast deep itching spread over every inch of Andras’s body, even inside the wound: the bites of lice. A few days later came the first tendrils of fever.
When the train stopped, it meant that they had reached the edge of the country. Again they were to be sorted into two groups: those who could cross and those who could not cross. Those who had typhus wouldn’t be allowed to cross. They would be placed in a quarantine camp on the border.
“Listen to me, Andras,” Tibor had said, just before the selection. “I’m going to pretend to be ill. I’m not going to be sent over the border. I’m going to stay with you here in the quarantine camp. Do you understand?”
“No, Tibor. If you stay, you’ll get sick for certain.” He thought of Mátyás, the long-ago illness, his own desperate night in the orchard.
“And if I go on ahead?”
“You have a skill. They need it. They’ll keep you alive.”
“They don’t care about my skill. I’m going to stay here with you and József and the others.”
“No, Tibor.”
“Yes.”
The boxcars became the barracks of the quarantine camp. At the station they were left on the switching rails, rows and rows of them, each with its cargo of dead and dying men. Every day the dead were hauled out of the cars and lined up beneath them on the frozen ground; it was impossible to bury them at that time of year. Andras lay on the floor of the boxcar in a rising fever, floating just inches above his dead comrades. He’d had no word from Klara in months, and no way to get word to her. Their second child would already have been born, or would not have been. Tamás would be nearly three years old. They might have been deported, or might not have been. He drifted in and out, knowing and not knowing, thinking and unable to think, as his brother slipped out of the quarantine camp and walked into Sopron for food, medicine, news. Every day Tibor returned with what little he could glean; he befriended a pharmacist who supplied him with small amounts of antibiotic and aspirin and morphine,
and whose radio picked up BBC News. Budapest had been under a grave threat since early November. Soviet tanks were on the approach from the southwest. Hitler had vowed to hold them off at all costs. Roads were blocked. Food and fuel supplies were running short. The capital had already begun to starve. Tibor would never have delivered that grim news to Andras, but Andras overheard him speaking to someone outside the boxcar; his fever-sharpened hearing carried every word.
He understood, too, that he and József were dying. Flecktyphus, he kept hearing, and dizentéria. One day Tibor had returned from town to find Andras and József with a bowl of beans between them; they’d managed to finish half of what they’d been given. He scolded them both and threw the beans out the boxcar door. Are you mad? For dysentery, nothing could be worse than barely cooked beans. Men died from eating them, but in the quarantine camp there was nothing else to eat. Instead, Tibor fed Andras and József the cooking liquid from the beans, sometimes with bits of bread. Once, bread with a slathering of jam that smelled faintly of petrol. Tibor explained: In his wanderings he’d come across a farmhouse that had been hit by a plane; he’d found a clay pot of preserves in the yard. Where was the clay pot? they asked. Shattered. Tibor had carried the jam in the palm of his hand, twenty kilometers.
As József got better on the food Tibor brought, Andras’s fever deepened. The flux rolled through him and emptied him. The skeleton of reality came apart, connective tissue peeling from the bones.
A constant foul smell that he knew was himself.
Cold.
Tibor weeping.
Tibor telling someone-József?-that Andras was near the end.
Tibor kneeling by his side, reminding him that today was Tamás’s birthday.
A resolution that he would not die that day, not on his son’s birthday.
Rising through his torn insides, a filament of strength.
Then, the next morning, a commotion in the quarantine camp. The sound of a megaphone. An announcement: All who could work were to be taken to Mürzzuschlag, in Austria. Soldiers searched the boxcars and pulled the living into a glare of cold light. A man in Nazi uniform dragged Andras outside and threw him onto the railroad tracks. Where was Tibor? Where was József? Andras lay with his cheek against the freezing rail, the metal burning his cheek, too weak to move, staring at the frost-rimed gravel, at the moving feet of men all around him. From somewhere nearby came the sound of metal on dirt: men shoveling. It seemed to go on for hours. He understood. Finally, the burial of the dead. And here he was, waiting to be buried. He had died, had gone across. He didn’t know when it had happened. He was surprised to find that it could be so simple. There was no alive, no dead; only this nightmare, always, and when the dirt covered him he would still feel cold and pain, would suffocate forever. A moment later he was caught up by the wrists and ankles and flung through the air. A moment of lightness, then falling. An impact he felt in all his joints, in his ravaged intestines. A stench. Beneath him, the bodies of men. Around him, walls of bare earth. A shovelful of earth in his face. The taste of it like something from childhood. He kept pushing and pushing it away from his face, but it came and came. The shoveler, a vigorous black form at the edge of the grave, pumped at a mound of dirt. Then, for no reason Andras could see, he stopped. A moment later he was gone, the task forgotten. And there Andras lay, not alive, not dead.
A night in an open grave, dirt for his blanket.
In the morning, someone dragging him out.
Again, the boxcar. And now.
Now.
Beside him was a bowl of beans. He was ravenous for them. Instead he tilted the bowl to his mouth, sipped the liquid. With that mouthful he felt his bowels loosen, and then, beneath him, heat.
Another day passed and darkened. Another night. Someone-Tibor?-tipped water into his mouth; he choked, swallowed. In the morning he crawled out of the boxcar, trying to escape the smell of himself. Unaccountably his head felt clearer. He paused, kneeling, and thrust his hand into the pocket of his overcoat, where, when there had been bread, he had carried bread. The pocket was sandy with crumbs. He pulled himself to a puddle where the sun had melted the snow. In one hand he held the crumbs. With the other he scooped water from the puddle. He made a cold paste, put his hand to his mouth, ate. It was his first solid food in twenty days, though he did not know it.
Sometime later he woke in the boxcar. József Hász was bending over him, urging him to sit up. “Give it a try,” József said, and lifted him from beneath the shoulders.
Andras sat up. Black ocean waves seemed to close over his head. Then, like a miracle, they receded. Here was the familiar interior of the boxcar. Here was József kneeling beside him, supporting his back with both hands.
“You’re going to have to stand now,” József said.
“Why?”
“Someone’s coming to gather men for a work detail. Anyone who can’t work will be shot.”
He knew he wouldn’t be selected for a work detail. He could scarcely raise his head. And then he remembered again: “Tibor?”
József shook his head. “Just me.”
“Where’s my brother, József? Where’s my brother?”
“They’ve been desperate for workers,” József said. “If a man can stand, they take him.”
“Who?”
“The Germans.”
“They took Tibor?”
“I don’t know, Andráska,” József said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him for days.”
Outside the boxcar, a German voice called men to attention.
“We’re going to have to walk now,” József said.
Tears came to Andras’s eyes: To die now, after everything. But József took him from beneath the arms and hoisted him to his feet. Andras fell against him. József swayed and yelped in pain; his shattered leg, freed from its cast, could only have been half knit. But he caught Andras around the back and led him toward the door of the boxcar. Slid it aside. Took Andras down a ramp and out onto the cold bare dirt of the rail yard. Thin blades of pain shot up from Andras’s feet and through his legs. In his side, along the surgical wound, a dull orange burning.
A Nazi officer stood before a row of labor servicemen, inspecting their soiled, ribbon-torn overcoats and trousers, their rag-bound feet. Andras’s and József’s feet were bare.
The officer cleared his throat. “All those who want to work, step forward.”
All the men stepped forward. József pulled Andras, whose legs buckled. Andras fell forward onto his hands and knees on the bare ground. The officer came toward him and knelt; he put a hand to the back of Andras’s neck, and reached into his own overcoat pocket. Andras imagined the barrel of a pistol, a noise, an explosion of light. To his shame, he felt his bladder release.
The officer had drawn out a handkerchief. He mopped Andras’s brow and helped him to his feet.
“I want to work,” Andras said. He had managed the words in German: Ich möchte arbeiten.
“How can you work?” the officer said. “You can’t even walk.”
Andras looked into the man’s face. He appeared almost as hungry, almost as ragged, as the work servicemen themselves; his age was impossible to determine. His cheeks, slack and windburned, showed a growth of colorless stubble. A small oval scar marked his jawline. He rubbed the scar with his thumb as he looked at Andras contemplatively.
“A wagon will be here in a few minutes,” he said at last. “You’ll come with us.”
“Where are we going?” Andras dared to ask. Wohin gehen wir?
“To Austria. To a work camp. There’s a doctor there who can help you.”
Everything seemed to have a terrible second meaning. Austria. A work camp. A doctor who could help him. Andras put a hand on József’s arm to steady himself, pulled himself to his bare feet, and made himself look into the Nazi’s eyes. The Nazi held his gaze, then turned sharply and marched off through the rows of boxcars. Exhausted, Andras leaned against József until the wagon arrived
. The Nazi officer quick-stepped alongside the wagon, carrying a pair of boots. He helped Andras and József into the wagon bed, then put the boots into Andras’s lap.
“Heil Hitler,” the officer said, saluting as the wagon pulled away.
A hundred times it might have been the end. It might have been the end when the wagon arrived at the work camp and the men were inspected, if the inspector hadn’t been a Jewish kapo who had taken pity on Andras and József-he’d assigned them to a work brigade rather than sending them to the infirmary, though they could scarcely walk. It might have been the end, again, on the day their group of a hundred men failed to meet its work quota: They were supposed to load fifty pallets of bricks onto flatbed trucks, and they’d only loaded forty-nine; as punishment, the guards selected two men, a gray-haired chemist from Budapest and a shoemaker from Kaposvár, and executed them behind the brick factory. It might have been the end when the food at the camp ran out, had not Andras and József, digging a trench for a latrine, come upon four clay jars buried in the ground: a cache of goose fat, a relic of a time when the camp had been a farm, and the farmer’s wife had foreseen lean days ahead. It might have been the end if the men at the camp had had time to finish their project, a vast crematorium in which their bodies would be burned after they had been gassed or shot. But it was not the end. On the first of April, as the exhausted and starving men waited to be marched from the assembly ground to the brickyard for the day’s work, József touched Andras’s shoulder and pointed toward a line of vehicles speeding along the military road beyond the barbed-wire fence.
The InvisibleBridge Page 72
