The Invisible Bridge (3 page)

Andras ventured a mute nod.

"Oh, no. You mustn't strain yourself." She pressed a button in the wall and Simon reappeared a moment later. He took the box from Andras and strode out through the front door of the house. Andras followed, and the elder Mrs. Hasz accompanied him to the driveway, where the long gray car was waiting. Apparently they meant to send him home in it. It was of English make, a Bentley. He wished Tibor were there to see it.

The elder Mrs. Hasz put a hand on his sleeve. "Thank you for everything," she said.

"It's a pleasure," Andras said, and bowed in farewell.

She pressed his arm and went inside; the door closed behind her without a sound.

As the car pulled away, Andras found himself twisting backward to look at the house again. He searched the windows, unsure of what he expected to see. There was no movement, no curtain-flutter or glimpse of a face. He imagined the younger Mrs. Hasz returning to the drawing room in wordless frustration, the elder retreating deeper behind that butter-colored facade, entering a room whose overstuffed furniture seemed to suffocate her, a room whose windows offered a comfortless view. He turned away and rested an arm on the box for Jozsef, and gave his Harsfa utca address for the last time.

HE TOLD T IBOR about the letter, of course; he couldn't have kept a secret like that from his brother. In their shared bedroom, Tibor took the envelope and held it up to the light. It was sealed with a clot of red wax into which the elder Mrs. Hasz had pressed her monogram.

"What do you make of it?" Andras said.

"Operatic intrigues," Tibor said, and smiled. "An old lady's fancy, coupled with paranoia about the unreliability of the post. A former paramour, this Morgenstern on the rue de Sevigne. That's what I'd bet." He returned the letter to Andras. "Now you're a player in their romance."

Andras tucked the letter into a pocket of his suitcase and told himself not to forget it. Then he checked his list for the fiftieth time, and found that there was nothing left to do now but to leave for Paris. To save the taxi fare, he and Tibor borrowed a wheelbarrow from the grocer next door and wheeled Andras's suitcase and Jozsef's enormous box all the way to Nyugati Station. At the ticket window there was a disagreement over Andras's passport, which apparently looked too new to be authentic; an emigration officer had to be consulted, and then a more exalted officer, and finally an uber-officer in a coat peppered with gold buttons, who made a tiny mark on the edge of the passport and reprimanded the other officers for calling him away from his duties.

Minutes after the matter had been settled, Andras, fumbling with his leather satchel, dropped his passport into the narrow gap between the platform and the train. A sympathetic gentleman offered his umbrella; Tibor inserted the umbrella between platform and train and slid the passport to a place where he could retrieve it.

"I'd say it looks authentic now," Tibor said, handing it over. The passport was smudged with dirt and torn at one corner where Tibor had stabbed it with the umbrella.

Andras replaced it in his pocket and they walked down the platform to the door of his third-class carriage, where a conductor in a red-and-gold cap ushered passengers aboard.

"Well," Tibor said. "I suppose you'd better find your seat." His eyes were damp behind his glasses, and he put a hand on Andras's arm. "Hold on to that passport from now on."

"I will," Andras said, not making a move to board the train. The great city of Paris awaited; suddenly he felt lightheaded with dread.

"All aboard," the conductor said, and gave Andras a significant look.

Tibor kissed Andras on both cheeks and drew him close for a long moment. When they were boys going off to school, their father had always put his hands on their heads and said the prayer for travel before he let them on the train; now Tibor whispered the words under his breath.
May God direct your steps toward tranquility and keep you from
the hands of every foe. May you be safe from all misfortune on this earth. May God grant
you mercy in his eyes and in the eyes of all who see you
. He kissed Andras again. "You'll come back a worldly man," he said. "An architect. You'll build me a house. I'm counting on it, do you hear?"

Andras couldn't speak. He let out a long breath and looked down at the smooth concrete of the platform, where travel stickers had adhered in multinational profusion.

Germany. Italy. France. The tie to his brother felt visceral, vascular, as though they were linked at the chest; the idea of boarding a train to be taken away from him seemed as wrong as ceasing to breathe. The train whistle blew.

Tibor removed his glasses and pressed the corners of his eyes. "Enough of this,"

he said. "I'll see you before long. Now go."

Sometime after dark, Andras found himself looking out the window at a little town where the street signs and shop signs were all in German. The train must have slipped over the border without his knowing it; while he had been asleep with a book of Petofi poems on his lap, they had left the landlocked ovulet of Hungary and entered the larger world. He cupped his hands against the glass and looked for Austrians in the narrow lanes, but could see none; gradually the houses became smaller and farther apart, and the town dwindled into countryside. Austrian barns, shadowy in moonlight. Austrian cows. An Austrian wagon, piled with silver hay. In the far distance, against a night-blue sky, the deeper blue of mountains. He opened the window a few inches; the air outside was crisp and smelled of woodsmoke.

He had the strange sensation of not knowing who he was, of having traveled off the map of his own existence. It was the opposite of the feeling he had every time he traveled east between Budapest and Konyar to see his parents; on those trips to his own birthplace there was a sense of moving deeper into himself, toward some essential core, as if toward the rice-sized miniature at the center of the Russian nesting doll his mother kept on the windowsill in her kitchen. But who might he imagine himself to be now, this Andras Levi on a train passing westward through Austria? Before he'd left Budapest, he had scarcely considered how ill-equipped he was for an adventure like this one, a five-year course of study at an architectural college in Paris. Vienna or Prague he might have managed; he had always gotten high marks in German, which he'd studied since the age of twelve. But it was Paris and the Ecole Speciale that wanted him, and now he would have to get by on his two years of half-forgotten French. He knew little more than a smattering of food names, body parts, and laudatory adjectives. Like the other boys at his school in Debrecen, he had memorized the French words for the sexual positions that appeared on a set of old photographs passed along from one generation of students to another:
croupade, les ciseaux, a la grecque
. The cards were so old, and had been handled so thoroughly, that the images of intertwined couples were visible only as silver ghosts, and only when the cards were held at a particular angle to the light. Beyond that, what did he know of French--or, for that matter, of France? He knew that the country bordered the Mediterranean on one side and the Atlantic on another. He knew a little about the troop movements and battles of the Great War. He knew, of course, about the great cathedrals at Reims and at Chartres; he knew about Notre-Dame, about Sacre-Coeur, about the Louvre. And that was all, give or take a fragmentary fact. In the few weeks he'd had to prepare for the trip, he'd tortured the pages of his antiquated phrase book, bought cheap at a used bookstore on Szent Istvan korut. The book must have predated the Great War; it offered translations for phrases like
Where might I hire a team
of horses?
and
I am Hungarian but my friend is Prussian
.

Last weekend when he'd gone home to Konyar say goodbye to his parents, he'd found himself confessing his fears to his father as they walked through the orchard after dinner. He hadn't meant to say anything; between the boys and their father was the tacit understanding that as Hungarian men, they were not to show any sign of weakness, even at times of crisis. But as they passed between the apple rows, kicking through the knee-high stems of wild grass, Andras felt compelled to speak. Why, he wondered aloud, had he been singled out for recognition among all the artists in the show in Paris? How had the Ecole Speciale admissions board determined that
he
, in particular, deserved their favor? Even if his pieces had shown some special merit, who was to say he could ever produce work like that again, or, more to the point, that he'd succeed at the study of architecture, a discipline vastly different from any he'd undertaken before? At best, he told his father, he was the beneficiary of misplaced faith; at worst, a simple fraud.

His father threw his head back and laughed. "A fraud?" he said. "You, who used to read aloud to me from Miklos Ybl when you were eight years old?"

"It's one thing to love an art and another to be good at it."

"There was a time when men studied architecture just because it was a noble pursuit," his father said.

"There are nobler pursuits. The medical arts, for example."

"That's your brother's talent. You've got your own. And now you've got time and money to court it."

"And what if I fail?"

"Ah! Then you'll have a story to tell."

Andras picked up a fallen branch from the ground and switched at the long grass.

"It seems selfish," he said. "Going off to school in Paris, and at someone else's expense."

"You'd be going at my expense if I could afford it, believe me. I won't have you think of it as selfish."

"What if you get pneumonia again this year? The lumberyard can't run itself."

"Why not? I've got the foreman and five good sawyers. And Matyas isn't far away if I need more help."

"Matyas, that little crow?" Andras shook his head. "Even if you could catch him, you'd be lucky to get any work out of him."

"Oh, I could get work out of him," his father said. "Though I hope I won't have to.

That scapegrace will have trouble enough graduating, with all the foolery he's gotten into this past year. Did you know he's joined some sort of dance troupe? He's performing nights at a club and missing his morning classes."

"I've heard all about it. All the more reason I shouldn't be going off to school so far away. Once he moves to Budapest, someone's got to look after him."

"It's not your fault you can't go to school in Budapest," his father said. "You're at the mercy of your circumstances. I know something of that. But you do what you can with what you've got."

Andras understood what he meant. His father had gone to the Jewish theological seminary in Prague, and might have become a rabbi if it hadn't been for his own father's early death; a series of tragedies had attended him through his twenties, enough to have made a weaker man surrender to despair. Since then he'd experienced a reversal of fortune so profound that everyone in the village believed he must have been particularly pitied and favored by the Almighty. But Andras knew that everything good that had come to him was the result of his own sheer stubbornness and hard work.

"It's a blessing you're going to Paris," his father said. "Better to get out of this country where Jewish men have to feel second-class. I can promise you that's not going to improve while you're gone, though let's hope it won't get worse."

Now, as Andras rode westward in the darkened railway carriage, he heard those words in his mind again; he understood that there had been another fear beneath the ones he'd spoken aloud. He found himself thinking of a newspaper story he'd read recently about a horrible thing that had happened a few weeks earlier in the Polish town of Sandomierz: In the middle of the night the windows of shops in the Jewish Quarter had been broken, and small paper-wrapped projectiles had been thrown inside. When the shop owners unwrapped the projectiles, they saw that they were the sawn-off hooves of goats.

Jews' Feet
, the paper wrappings read.

Nothing like that had ever happened in Konyar; Jews and non-Jews had lived there in relative peace for centuries. But the seeds were there, Andras knew. At his primary school in Konyar, his schoolmates had called him Zsidocska, little Jew; when they'd all gone swimming, his circumcision had been a mark of shame. One time they held him down and tried to force a sliver of pork sausage between his clenched teeth.

Those boys' older brothers had tormented Tibor, and a younger set had been waiting for Matyas when he got to school. How would those Konyar boys, now grown into men, read the news from Poland? What seemed an atrocity to him might seem to them like justice, or permission. He put his head against the cool glass of the window and stared into the unfamiliar landscape, surprised only by how much it looked like the flatland country where he had been born.

In Vienna the train stopped at a station far grander than any Andras had ever seen.

The facade, ten stories high, was composed of glass panes supported by a gridwork of gilded iron; the supports were curlicued and flowered and cherubed in a design that seemed better suited to a boudoir than a train station. Andras got off the train and followed the scent of bread to a cart where a woman in a white cap was selling salt-studded pretzels. But the woman wouldn't take his pengo or his francs. In her insistent German she tried to explain what Andras must do, pointing him toward the money-changing booth. The line at the booth snaked around a corner. Andras looked at the station clock and then at the stack of pretzels. It had been eight hours since he'd eaten the delicate sandwiches at the house on Benczur utca.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to find the gentleman from Keleti Station, the one who had let Tibor use his umbrella to retrieve Andras's passport.

The man was dressed in a gray traveling suit and a light overcoat; the dull gold of a watch chain shone against his vest. He was barrel-chested and tall, his dark hair brushed back in waves from a high domed forehead. He carried a glossy briefcase and a copy of
La Revue
du Cinema
.