The Invisible Bridge (43 page)

Tibor nudged the corner of his leather satchel with the toe of his polished shoe. "I think you'd better write to Anya and Apa," he said. "Let them know what's happened between you and Klara. Tell them as much as you can about her situation. I'll write them too. I'll tell them I've gotten to know her, and that I don't consider you mad for wanting to marry her."

"I

am
mad, though."

"No more so than any man in love," Tibor said.

The conductor blew the boarding whistle. Tibor got to his feet and drew Andras close in a quick embrace. "Be a good man, little brother," he said.

"Bon voyage," Andras said. "Have a good spring. Study hard. Cure the sick."

Tibor crossed the platform and boarded the train, his bag slung over his shoulder.

Moments after he'd climbed aboard, the train gave a vast metallic groan; with a series of grunts and screeches it began to roll from the station. The grasshopper legs of the engine bent and flexed. Andras hoped Tibor had found a window seat, where he would have the comfort of watching the city fade into the darkness of the wintry fields. He hoped Tibor would be able to sleep. He hoped he'd get home swiftly, and that once he was there he would forget there had ever been a girl called Ilana di Sabato.

That year's Spectacle d'Hiver was a quiet and humble affair. The Theatre Deux Anges was small and shabby and ill-heated, its blue velvet seats faded to gray; the dark upper tiers seemed full of ghosts. Girls chased each other across the stage in costumes of blue and white satin, and a silver snow drifted down from some cold cloud in the flyspace. A group of twelve-year-olds in icy pink tulle put Andras in mind of dawn on New Year's Day. He thought of Klara at the Square Barye: the flush of her forehead beneath her red wool hat, the crystalline dew on her eyebrows, the fog of her breath in the cold air. He could scarcely believe she would be waiting for him backstage after the recital--the same woman who had kissed him in that frozen park nearly a year ago. It seemed a miracle that any man who loved a woman might be loved by her in return. He rubbed his hands together in the chill and waited for the violet lights to fade.

Sportsclub Saint-Germain

EVERY SPRING the students of the Ecole Speciale competed for the Prix du Amphitheatre, which brought its winner a gold medal worth a hundred francs, the admiration of the other students, and a measure of prestige for the winner's curriculum vitae. Last year's prize had gone to the beautiful Lucia for her design of a reinforced-concrete apartment building. This year's subject was an urban gymnasium for Olympic sports: swimming, diving, gymnastics, weightlifting, running, fencing. It seemed to Andras a ridiculous notion to design a gymnasium while Europe edged toward war.

Refugees poured into France from fractured Spain; the Marais had become a swamp of asylum-seekers. Hundreds of thousands more had been detained at the border and sent to internment camps in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Every day brought bad news, and the worst always seemed to come from Czechoslovakia. Hitler had told the Czech foreign minister that the nation must take a more aggressive approach to its Jewish problem; a week later the Czech government threw Jewish men and women out of their university professorships and civil-service jobs and public-health positions. In Hungary, Horthy followed suit by calling for a new cabinet that would support a stronger alliance with the Axis powers. It wouldn't be long, newspaper columnists speculated, before the Hungarian parliament passed new anti-Jewish laws, too.

In the face of such news, how was Andras supposed to design a swimming pool, a locker room, a yard for fencing practice? Late one night he sat in the studio with an open letter on the table before him, his drawing tools still in their box. The letter had come earlier that day from his brother Matyas:
12 February 1939

BudapestAndraska,

Anya and Apa have just told me your great news. Mazel tov! I must meet the lucky girl as
soon as possible. Since it seems you'll be in France for theforeseeable future, I will have
to join you there. I'm saving money already. By now you've heard from our parents that I
have left school. I am living in Budapest and working as a window trimmer. It's a good
trade. I make 20 pengo a week. My best client is the haberdasher on Molnar utca. I heard
from a friend that their old window trimmer had quit, so I went there the next day and
offered my services. They told me to trim the window as a trial. I made a hunting display:
two riding suits, one cloak, four neckties, a hunting blanket, a hat, a horn. I finished in an
hour, and in another hour they had sold everything in the window. Even the
horn
.
Budapest is grand. I have many new friends here and perhaps one girlfriend. Also a
fabulous dance teacher, an American Negro who calls himself Kid Sneeks. A month ago I
saw him at the Gold Hat with his tap-dance team, the Five Hot Shots. After the show I
stayed to meet the star. With the help of my girlfriend, who speaks a few words of
English, I told him I was a dancer and asked him to take me on as a pupil. He said, Let's
see what you can do. I showed him everything. On the spot he gave me the English
nickname of Lightning and agreed to teach me as long as he's in Budapest. And his show
is so popular it's been held over another month
.
I know you will scold me for quitting
gimnazium, but believe me I am happier now. I hated school. The masters punished me
for my bad attitude. The other boys were idiots. And Debrecen! What a place. Not the
country nor the city, not modern nor quaint, not home nor a place I would want to make
my home. In Budapest there is a better Jewish gimnazium. If I can, I will transfer my
records and finish my studies there. Then I will come to you in Paris and go onto the
stage. If you're kind to me I will teach you to tap-dance
.
Do not worry about me, brother.

I am fine. I'm glad you are also fine. Don't marry before I get there. I want to kiss the
bride on your wedding day
.
Love,

Your MATYAS

He read and reread the letter.
I will finish my studies. Come to you in Paris. Go
onto the stage
. How did Matyas expect any of those things to happen if Europe went to war? Did he read the newspapers? Did he expect that the world's problems might be solved through tap-dancing? What was Andras supposed to write in return?

He heard footsteps approaching in the hall; it was the middle of the night, and he hadn't arranged to meet anyone. Without thinking, he opened his pencil box and reached for his sharpening knife. But then the footsteps resolved into a familiar tread, and there was Professor Vago in his evening clothes, leaning against the doorjamb.

"It's three o'clock in the morning," Vago said. "If you wanted to read your mail, couldn't you have done it at home?"

Andras shrugged and smiled. "It's warmer here," he said. Then, raising an eyebrow at Vago's suit: "Nice tuxedo."

Vago tugged at his lapels. "This is the last suit of clothing I own without an ink or charcoal stain."

"So you've come here to spill ink on yourself."

"Something

like

that."

"Where were you, the opera?"

He plucked the rose out of his buttonhole and gave it a slow reflective twirl. "I was out dancing with Madame Vago, if you want to know. She likes that sort of thing.

But she gets tired around halfway to dawn, whereas I find I can't sleep after dancing." He came toward the worktable and bent over Andras's drawings. "Are these for the contest?"

"Yes. Polaner started them. I'm supposed to finish."

"You were wise to partner with him. He's one of our best."

"He was unwise," Andras said. "He chose me."

"May I?" Vago said. He took Andras's notebook and looked through the sketches, pausing over the drawings of the pool with its retractable roof. He flipped the page to the drawing of the natatorium with the roof open, and then back to the drawing of the same room with its roof closed.

"It's all done with hydraulics," Andras said, pointing out the closet that would house the machinery. "And the panels are curved and overlapped at the meeting point here, so the weather won't come through." He paused and bit the end of his drafting pencil, anxious to know what Vago thought. It was a design inspired as much by Forestier's chameleonic stage sets as by Lemain's sleek public buildings.

"It's fine work," Vago said. "You do your mentors credit. But why are you mooning around here in the middle of the night? If you're going to come to school at three in the morning, at the very least you ought to be working."

"I can't concentrate," Andras said. "Everything's falling apart. Look at this." He took a newspaper from his schoolbag and pushed it across the desk toward Vago. On the front page, a photograph showed Jewish students crowded at the gates of a university in Prague; they had been summarily disenrolled and were not allowed to enter. Vago picked up the paper and studied the photograph, then dropped it onto the worktable.

"You're
still in school," he said. "Are you going to do your work?"

"I want to," Andras said.

"Then

do."

"But I feel like I have to do something more than draw buildings. I want to go to Prague and march in the streets."

Vago pulled up a stool and sat down. He took off his long silk scarf and folded it over his knees. "Listen," he said. "Those bastards in Berlin can go to hell. They can't kick anyone out of school here in Paris. You're an artist and you have to practice."

"But a gymnasium," Andras said. "At a time like this."

"At a time like this, everything's political," Vago said. "Our Magyar countrymen didn't let Jewish athletes swim for them in '36, though their time trials were better than the medalists'. But here you are, a Jewish architecture student, designing an athletic club to be built in a country where Jews can still qualify for the Olympics."

"For now, anyway."

"Why

'for

now'?"

"It hasn't escaped my notice that Daladier brought von Ribbentrop here to sign a friendship pact. And do you know that only the quote-unquote Aryan cabinet ministers were invited to Bonnet's banquet afterward? Can you guess who wasn't invited? Jean Zay. Georges Mandel. Jews, both."

"I heard about that dinner, and who was and wasn't there. It's not as simple as you make it out to be. More than a few who were asked declined in protest."

"But Zay and Mandel
weren't
asked. That's my point." He opened his box and took out a pencil and the sharpening knife. "With due respect," he said, "it's easy for you to talk about this in the abstract. Those aren't your people at the school gate."

"They're people," Vago said. "That's enough. It's a stain upon humanity, this Jew-hating dressed up as nationalism. It's a sickness. I've thought about it every day since those little fascists attacked Polaner."

"And this is what you've concluded?" Andras said. "That we should put our heads down and keep working?"

"Polaner did," Vago said. "So should you."

...
18 March 1939

KonyarMy dear Andras,

You can imagine how your mother and I feel about the fate of Czechoslovakia. The rape
of the Sudetenland was injury enough. But to see Hitler strip away Slovakia, and then
march into Prague unchecked! Those streets where I spent my student days, now filled
with Nazi soldiers! Perhaps I was naive to expect otherwise. Once Slovakia was gone, the
country Britain and France agreed to protect had ceased to exist. But one feels as though
this string of outrages cannot go on indefinitely. It has to stop, or must be stopped
.
There
has been much right-wing rejoicing here, of course, about the return of Ruthenia to
Hungary. What was stolen from us is ours again, and so on. You know I am a veteran of
the Great War and have some sense of national pride. But we know by now what is
beneath the flag-wavers' desire for vindication
.
All this bad news notwithstanding, your
mother and I agree with Professor Vago. You must not allow recent events to distract you
from your studies. You must stay in school. If you're to be married you must have a trade.

You've done well so far and will make a fine architect. And perhaps France will be a
safer place for you than Hungary. In any case, I will be angry indeed if you throw away
what's been given to you. A chance like that comes only once
.
How stern I sound. You
know I send my love. I've enclosed a letter from your mother
.
APADear Andraska,
Listen to your apa! And keep warm. You've always been prone to fevers in March. And
send me the photograph of your Klara. You made a promise. I will hold you to it
.
Love,
ANYA

Each letter with its payload of news and love, each with its reminder of his parents' mortality. The fact that they had survived two more winters in Konyar without illness or injury hardly helped to assuage his worry; every winter would carry greater danger. He thought about them constantly as the bad news poured in, a deluge of it all spring. In late March the bloody horror of the Spanish Civil War drew to a close; the Republican army surrendered on the morning of the twenty-ninth, and Franco's troops entered the capital. It was the beginning of the dictatorship foreseen by Hitler and Mussolini, he knew--the very reason they had poured their armaments and troops into the blast furnace of that war. He wondered if those two victories--the splintering of Czechoslovakia and the triumph of Franco in Spain--were what gave Hitler the courage to defy the American president in April. All the papers carried the story: On the fifteenth, Roosevelt had sent Hitler a telegram demanding assurance that Germany would not attack or invade any of a list of thirty-one independent states for at least ten years--including Poland, across which Hitler had proposed a highway and rail corridor to link Germany with East Prussia. After two weeks' stalling, Hitler responded. In a speech at the Reichstag he denounced Germany's naval accord with England, tore up the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, and ridiculed Roosevelt's telegram in every detail. He finished by accusing Roosevelt of meddling in international affairs while he, Hitler, concerned himself only with the fate of his own small nation, which he had already rescued from the ignominy and ruin of 1919.