The Invisible Bridge (26 page)

"Remember those huts you used to build in Konyar?" Tibor said. "Your housing business?"

The housing business. The summer he turned nine, just before he'd started school in Debrecen, he had become a building contractor for the neighborhood boys. He had a monopoly on scrap wood, and could build a fort or clubhouse in half a day. Four-year-old Matyas was his assistant. Matyas would come along on the jobs and solemnly hand nails to Andras as Andras pounded the huts together. In return for his building services, Andras collected whatever the boys had to offer: a photograph of someone's father in a soldier's uniform, a fleet of tiny tin warplanes, a cat's skull, a balsa boat, a white mouse in a cage.

That summer he had been the richest boy in town.

"Remember my mouse?" Andras said. "Remember what you used to call him?"

"Eliahu

ha

Navi."

"Anya hated that. She thought it was sacrilegious." He smiled and flexed his fingers against the cold curb. The shadows were lengthening, and the chill had made its way through the layers of his clothing. He was ready to suggest they keep walking, but Tibor leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the roof garden with its row of little evergreens.

"That was the year I fell in love for the first time," he said. "I never told you. You were too young to understand, and by the time you were old enough I was in love with someone else, Zsuzsanna, that girl I used to take to dances at gimnazium. But before her there was a girl named Rozsa Geller. Rozsika. I was thirteen, she was sixteen. She was the oldest daughter of the family I boarded with in Debrecen. The ones who moved away just before you came to school."

Andras caught an unfamiliar edge in Tibor's voice, almost a note of bitterness.

"Sixteen," he said, and gave a low whistle. "An older woman."

"I used to watch her bathing. She used to bathe in the kitchen in a tin washtub, and my bed was on the other side of the curtain. That curtain was full of holes. She must have known I was watching."

"And you saw everything."

"Everything. She would stand there pouring water over herself and humming the Marseillaise."

"Why the Marseillaise?"

"She was in love with some French film star. He'd been in a lot of war movies."

"Pierre

Fresnay."

"That's right, that was the bastard's name. How did you know?"

"That friend of mine, Ben Yakov, looks just like him."

"Hm. I'm glad I didn't know that when I met your friend."

"So what happened?"

"One day her father caught me watching. He beat me bloody. Broke my arm."

"You broke your arm playing football!"

"That was the official story. Her father said he'd turn me over to the police if I told the truth. They put me out of the house. I never saw her again."

"Oh, God, Tibor. I never knew."

"That was the idea."

"It's terrible! You were only thirteen."

"And she was sixteen. She knew better than to let it go on. She must have known I'd get caught eventually. Maybe she wanted me to get caught." He stood and brushed the dust from his trousers. "So you see, that's my experience with older women."

There was a motion behind one of the windows of the house, the shadow of a woman crossing a square of light. Andras stood up beside his brother. He imagined the sculptor coming to her window, seeing them loitering there as if they were waiting to catch a glimpse of her.

"I'm not thirteen," Andras said. "Klara's not sixteen."

"No, indeed," Tibor said. "You're adults. Which means the consequences may be graver if you get in over your heads."

"It's too late," Andras said. "I'm already in over my head. I don't know what'll happen. I'm at her mercy."

"I hope she'll show some mercy, then," Tibor said. And he used the Yiddish word
rachmones
, the same word that had called Andras back to himself three months earlier at the Jardin du Luxembourg.

The next morning they carried Tibor's bags to the Gare de Lyon, just as they'd carried Andras's bags to Nyugati Station when he'd left for Paris. Now it was Tibor going off to an unknown life in a foreign place, Tibor going off to study and work and navigate the dark passageways of a foreign language. The wind roared through the channels of the boulevards and tried to twist the suitcases from their hands; the previous day's warm weather was gone as though they'd only dreamed it. Paris was as gray as it had been the day Andras had arrived. He wished he had an excuse to keep Tibor with him another day, another week. Tibor was right, of course. It was a foolish thing Andras had done, getting involved with Klara Morgenstern. He'd already ventured into dangerous terrain, had found himself edging along a dwindling path toward a blind corner of rock. He didn't have the shoes for this, nor the provisions, nor the clothing, nor the foresight, nor the mental strength, nor the experience. All he had was a kind of reckless hope--something, he imagined, not unlike the hope that had sent fifteenth-century explorers hurtling off the map. Having pointed out how ill-equipped Andras was, how could Tibor now let him go on alone? How could he step onto a train and speed off to Italy, even if medical school waited at the other end? His role had always been to show Andras the way when the way was obscure--at times, in their boyhood, quite literally, his hand was Andras's only guide in the dark. But now they had reached the Gare de Lyon; there was the train itself, black and impassive on its tracks.

"All right, then," Tibor said. "Off I go."

Stay
, Andras wanted to say. "Good luck," he said.

"Write to me. And don't get in trouble. Do you understand?"

"I

understand."

"Good. I'll see you before long."

Liar
, Andras wanted to say.

Tibor put a hand on Andras's sleeve. He looked as if he meant to say something more, a few final words in Hungarian before he boarded a train full of Italian- and French-speakers, but he was silent as he glanced off toward the vast mouth of the station and the tangle of tracks that lay beyond it. He stepped up onto the train and Andras handed him his leather satchel. His silver-rimmed glasses slid down the bridge of his nose; he pushed them back with his thumb.

"Write me when you get there," Andras said.

Tibor touched his cap and disappeared into the third-class car, and was gone.

When the train had left the station, Andras went back through the
SORTIE
doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn't care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs. His feet led him farther from his brother, westward across town to the boulevard Raspail, all the way to the Ecole Speciale, and in through the blue doors of the courtyard.

The yard was full of students, all of them strangely silent, standing in head-bowed clumps of three and four. A heavy stillness hung in the air above the yard. It had a palpable black presence, like a flock of crows frozen midflight. On a splintered bench in a corner Perret himself sat with his head in his hands.

This was what had happened: By way of the slow-moving provincial post, the news of Polaner's injuries had reached Lemarque in Bayeux, where he'd fled to his parents' farm after the attack. The letter, written by his accomplices, told him that Polaner lay in the hospital on the brink of death, bleeding from internal wounds: an account meant to hearten Lemarque, to show him that all had not been in vain, that the work of the beating had continued after the attack. Having received this letter, Lemarque had written two of his own. One he addressed to the directors of the school, claiming responsibility for what had happened and naming three other students, third- and fourth-year men, who had participated. The other he addressed to Polaner, a brief admission of remorse and love. Late at night, after he'd left both letters on the kitchen table, he'd hanged himself from a crossbeam in his parents' barn. His father had discovered the body that morning, cold and blue as the hibernal dawn itself.

IT WAS DECIDED--first in a late-night meeting at Perret's office, then later still at the Blue Dove--that Andras would be the one to break the news of Lemarque's death to Polaner. Perret believed it was his own responsibility as director of the school, but Vago argued that the delicacy of the situation called for special measures; it might be easier, he said, if the news were to come from a friend. Andras and Rosen and Ben Yakov agreed, and decided among themselves that Andras should be the one to give Polaner the letter.

They would wait, of course, until the doctors considered him to be out of danger; there was reason to think that time might come soon. After a second week in the hospital the symptoms and aftereffects of internal bleeding had abated. Polaner's disorientation had passed, his bruising and swelling had receded; he could eat and drink again on his own.

He would be in a weakened state for nearly a month, the doctors said, while he remade the blood that had been lost, but all agreed that he had moved back from the brink. That weekend, in fact, he appeared so well recovered that Andras dared to approach one of his doctors and explain in careful French about Lemarque. The doctor, a long-faced internist who had made Polaner's case his special project, expressed concern about the possible effects of the shock; but because the news could not be kept from Polaner forever, the doctor agreed that it might be better to tell him while he was still in the hospital and could be closely watched.

The next day, as Andras sat in the now-familiar steel chair beside the bed, he introduced the subject of the Ecole Speciale for the first time since the attack. Now that Polaner was mending so well, Andras said, the doctor thought he might consider a gradual return to his schoolwork. Could Andras bring him anything from the studio--his statics texts, his drawing tools, a sketchbook?

Polaner gave Andras a look of pity and closed his eyes. "I'm not going back to school," he said. "I'm going home to Krakow."

Andras laid a hand on his arm. "Is that what you want?"

Polaner let out a long breath. "It's been decided for me," he said. "They decided it."

"Nothing's been decided. You'll go back to school if you want."

"I can't," Polaner said, his eyes filling with tears. "How can I face Lemarque, or any of them? I can't go to studio and sit down at my table as if nothing happened."

There was no use waiting any longer; Andras took the letter from his pocket and put it into Polaner's hands. Polaner spent a long moment looking at the envelope, at his name written in Lemarque's sharp-edged print. Then he opened the letter and flattened the single sheet against his leg. He read the six lines in which Lemarque confessed himself and begged Polaner's pardon, both for the attack and for what he felt he must do. When he'd finished reading, he folded the note again and lay back against the pillow, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling beneath the sheet.

"Oh, God," he said in a half whisper. "It's as though I killed him myself."

Before that moment Andras had believed that his hate for Lemarque had reached its limit, that with Lemarque's death his feelings had moved past hate toward something more like pity. But as he watched Polaner grieve, as he watched the familiar lines and planes of his friend's face crumple under the burden of the news, he found himself shaking with anger. How much worse that Lemarque's death had come with this confession of remorse and love! Now Polaner would always have to consider what had been lost, what might have been if the world had been a different place. Here was a cruelty beyond the attack and the death itself, a sting like that of certain fire nettles that grew on the Hajdu plain: Once the spine was in, it would work its way deeper into the wound and discharge its poison there for days, for weeks, while the victim burned.

He stayed with Polaner that night long past dark, ignoring the ward nurse's reminder that visiting hours were over. When she insisted, he told her she would have to call the police to get rid of him; eventually the long-faced doctor interceded on Andras's behalf, and he was allowed to stay all night and into the next morning. As he kept watch beside the bed, his mind kept returning to what Polaner had said at the Blue Dove in October:
I just want to keep my head down. I want to study and get my degree
. If it were in his power, he thought, he would not let Polaner's shame and grief send him home to Krakow.

Another week passed before Polaner left the hospital. When he did, it was Andras who brought him home to his room on the boulevard Saint-Germain. He watched over Polaner's injuries, kept him fed, took his clothes to the laundry, built up the fire in the grate when it burned low. One morning he returned from the bakery to find Polaner sitting up in bed with a drawing tablet angled against his knees; the coverlet was snowed with pencil shavings, the chair beside the bed strewn with charcoals. Andras said not a word as he deposited a pair of baguettes on the table. He prepared bread and jam and tea for Polaner and gave it to him in bed, then took a seat at Polaner's table. And all morning the noise of Polaner's pencil followed him through his own work like music.

Later that morning, Polaner stood before the mirror at the bureau and ran his hands over his stubble-shadowed chin. "I look like a criminal," he said. "I look like I've been in jail for months."

"You look a good deal better than you did a few weeks ago."

"It seems absurd to think about a haircut," he said, almost in a whisper.

"What's absurd about it?"

"I don't know. Everything. To begin with, I don't know if I can sit in a barber's chair and carry on a barbershop conversation."