The Invisible Bridge (68 page)

Tibor.

Tibor.

They shouted his name in a frenzy of insistence, as if trying to convince themselves he was real, and they brought him into the house. Tibor was deathly pale in the dim light of the sitting room. His small silver-rimmed glasses were gone, the bones of his face a sharp scaffolding beneath the skin. His coat was in rags, his trousers stiff with ice and dried blood, his boots a disaster of shredded leather. His military cap was gone. In its place he wore a fleece-lined motorcyclist's cap from which one ear-covering had been torn away. The exposed ear was crimson with cold. Tibor tugged the cap from his head and let it fall to the floor. His hair looked as though it had been hacked to the scalp with dull scissors some weeks earlier. He had the smell of the Munkaszolgalat about him, the reek of men living together without adequate water or soap or tooth powder. That smell was mingled with the sulfurous odor of brown-coal smoke and the shit-and-sawdust stink of boxcars.

"Let me see my boy," he said, his voice scarcely louder than a whisper, as if he hadn't used it in days.

Ilana handed him the baby in its white swaddling of blankets. Tibor laid the baby on the sofa and knelt beside him. He took off the blanket, the cap covering the baby's fine dark hair, the long-sleeved cotton shirt, the little pants, the socks, the diaper; through it all, the baby was silent and wide-eyed, its hands curled into fists. Tibor touched the dried remnant of the baby's umbilical cord. He held the baby's feet, the baby's hands. He put his face against the crease of the baby's neck. The baby's name was Adam. It was what Tibor and Ilana had decided in the letters they'd exchanged. He said the name now, as if trying to bring together the idea of this baby and the actual naked child lying on the sofa. Then he glanced up at Ilana.

"Ilanka," he said. "I'm so sorry. I wanted to be home in time."

"No," she said, bending to him. "Please don't cry."

But he was crying. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it. He cried, and they sat down on the floor with him as though they were all in mourning. But they were not in mourning, not then; they were together, the six of them, in what was still a city unghettoized, unburned, unbombed. They sat together on the floor until Tibor stopped crying, until he could draw a full breath. He drew one deep throaty breath after another, and finally took a slow inhale through his nose.

"Oh, God," he said, with a horrified look at Andras. "I stink. Get me out of these clothes." He began pulling at the collar of his shredded coat. "I shouldn't have touched the baby before I washed. I'm filthy!" He got up off the floor and went to the kitchen, leaving a trail of stiff clothing behind him. They heard the clang of a tin washtub being dropped onto the kitchen tiles, and the roar of water in the sink.

"I'll help him," Ilana said. "Will you take the baby?"

"Give him to me," Klara said, and handed Tamas to Andras. They sat together on the sofa, Andras and Klara and the two babies, while Ilana heated water for Tibor's bath.

In the meantime, Tibor ate dinner in his ragged undershirt and Munkaszolgalat trousers.

Then Ilana undressed him and washed him from head to toe with a new cake of soap. The smell of almonds drifted in from the kitchen. When that was finished she dressed him in a pair of flannel-lined pajamas, and he moved toward the bedroom as though he were walking in a dream. Andras followed him to the bed and sat down beside him with Tamas in his arms. Klara was close behind, holding Tibor's son. Ilana put a pair of hot towel-wrapped bricks into the bed at Tibor's feet and pulled the eiderdown up to his chin. They all sat with him on the bed, still trying to believe he was there.

But Tibor, or part of Tibor, had not yet returned; as he drifted to the edge of sleep he made a frightened noise, as if a stone had fallen onto his chest and knocked the wind out of him. He looked at them all, eyes wide, and said, "I'm sorry." His eyes closed again, and he drifted again, and made that frightened noise--
Hunh!
--and jerked awake. "I'm sorry," he said again, and drifted, and woke. He was sorry. His eyelids closed; he breathed; he made his noise and jerked awake, haunted by something that waited on the other side of consciousness. They stayed with him through a full hour of it until he fell into a deeper sleep at last.

Tibor's favorite coffeehouse, the Jokai, had been replaced by a barbershop with six gleaming new chairs and a brace of mustachioed barbers. That morning the barbers were practicing their art upon the heads of two boys in military uniform. The boys looked as though they could scarcely be out of high school. They had identical jutting chins and identical peaked eyebrows; their feet, on the barber-chair footrests, were identically pigeon-toed. They must have been brothers, if not twins. Andras glanced at Tibor, whose look seemed to ask what these two brothers meant, patronizing the barbers who had neatly razored away the Jokai Kavehaz and replaced it with this sterile black-and-white-tiled shop. There was no question of Andras and Tibor's stopping in for a shave. The Jokai Barbershop was a traitor.

Instead they went back down Andrassy ut to the Artists' Cafe, a Belle Epoque establishment with wrought-iron tables, amber-shaded lamps, and a glass case full of cakes. Andras insisted upon ordering a slice of Sachertorte, against Tibor's objections--it was too expensive, too rich, he couldn't eat more than a bite.

"You need something rich," Andras said. "Something made with butter."

Tibor mustered a wan smile. "You sound like our mother."

"If I do, you should listen."

That smile again--a pale, preserved-looking version of Tibor's old smile, like something kept in a jar in a museum. When the torte arrived, he cut a piece with his fork and let it sit at the edge of the plate.

"You've heard the news from the Delvidek by now," Tibor said.

Andras stirred his coffee and extracted the spoon. "I've read an article and heard some awful rumors."

Tibor gave a barely perceptible nod. "I was there," he said.

Andras raised his eyes to his brother's. It was disconcerting to see Tibor without his glasses, which had refracted his unusually large eyes into balance with the rest of his features. Without them he looked raw and vulnerable. The diet of cabbage soup and brown bread and coffee had whittled him down to this elemental state; he was essence of Tibor, reduction of Tibor, the necessary ingredient that might be recombined with ordinary life to produce the Tibor that Andras knew. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear what had happened to Tibor in the Delvidek. He bent to his coffee rather than meet those eyes.

"I was there a month and a half ago," Tibor began, and told the story. It had been late January. His Munkaszolgalat company had been attached to the Fifth Army Corps; they'd been slaving for an infantry company in Szeged, building pontoon bridges on the Tisza so the company could move its materiel across. One morning their sergeant had called them away from that work and told them they were needed for a ditch-digging project. They were trucked to a town called Mosorin, marched to a field, and commanded to dig a trench. "I remember the dimensions," Tibor said. "Twenty meters long, two and a half meters wide, two meters deep. We had to do it by nightfall."

At the table beside them, a young woman sitting with her two little girls gave Tibor a long look and then glanced away. He touched the scroll embellishment at the end of his fork and continued in a lowered voice.

"We dug the trench," he said. "We thought it was for a battle. But it wasn't for a battle. After dark, they marched a group of people to the field. Men and women. A hundred and twenty-three of them. We were sitting on one side of the ditch eating our soup."

The young woman had turned slightly in her chair. She was perhaps thirty years old; they saw now that she wore a silver Star of David on a narrow chain at her neck. She raised her eyes toward her children, who were sharing a cup of chocolate and finishing the last crumbs of a slice of poppyseed strudel.

When Tibor spoke again, his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper. "There were children there, too," he said. "Teenagers. Some of them couldn't have been older than twelve or thirteen."

"Zsuzsi, Anni," the woman said. "Why don't you go choose some little cakes to take to your grandmother?"

"I'm not done with my chocolate," the smaller girl said.

"Tibor," Andras said, laying a hand on his brother's arm. "Tell me later."

"No," the woman said quietly, meeting Andras's eye. "It's all right." To the girls she said, "Go ahead, I'll come in a moment." The older girl put on her coat and helped the younger one get her sleeves turned right side out. Then they went to the pastry counter and stared at the display of cakes, their fingers pressed against the glass. The woman folded her hands in her lap and looked down at her empty teacup.

"They lined up these people in front of the ditch," Tibor said. "Hungarians. Jews, all of them. They made them strip naked and stand there in the freezing cold for half an hour. And they shot them," he said. "Even the children. Then we had to bury them. Some of them weren't dead yet. The soldiers turned their guns on us while we did it."

Andras glanced at the woman beside them, who had covered her mouth with her hand. At the pastry counter beyond, her two little girls argued the merits of the cakes.

"What's to stop them from doing it to us?" Tibor said. "We're not safe here. Do you understand me?"

"I understand," Andras said. Of course they weren't safe. There wasn't a minute that passed without his thinking about it. And the danger was deeper than Tibor knew: Andras still hadn't told him about the situation with Klara and the Ministry of Justice.

"The threat is here inside the country," Tibor said. "We're lying to ourselves if we think we'll be fine as long as Horthy holds off a German occupation. What about the Arrow Cross? What about plain old Hungarian bigotry?"

"What do you propose we do?" Andras said.

"Let me tell you something," Tibor said. "I want to get off this continent. I want to get my wife and son out. If we stay in Europe we're going to die."

"How are we supposed to get out? The border's closed. It's impossible to get travel documents. No one will let us in. And there are the babies. It's bad enough to imagine doing it by ourselves." He looked over his shoulder; even to speak of these things in public seemed dangerous. "We can't leave now," he said. "It's impossible."

The woman at the next table sent a glance in Andras and Tibor's direction, her dark eyes moving between the two of them. At the counter, her little girls had made their selections; the older one turned and called for her to come. She stood and put on her hat and coat. As she slipped through the narrow space between the tables, she gave Andras and Tibor a curt nod. It wasn't until after she and her girls had disappeared through the beveled glass doors of the cafe that Andras noticed she'd dropped her handkerchief on the table. It was a fine linen handkerchief with a lace edge, embroidered with the letter
B
.

Andras lifted it to reveal a folded scrap of paper, the stub of a streetcar ticket, onto which something had been scratched in pencil:
K might be able to help you
. And an address in Angyalfold, near the end of the streetcar line.

"Look at this," Andras said, and handed the ticket stub to his brother.

Glassesless, Tibor squinted at the woman's tiny writing. "K might be able to help you," he said. "Who's K?"

They rode out past the apartment blocks of central Pest, out into an industrial suburb where textile factories and machine works exhaled gray smoke into a mackerel sky. Military supply trucks rumbled down the streets, their beds stacked with steel tubes and I-beams, concrete flume sections and cinderblocks and giant parabolas of iron like leviathan ribs. They got off the streetcar at the end of the line and walked out past an ancient madhouse and a wool-washing plant, past three blocks of crumbling tenements, to a small side street called Frangepan koz, where a cluster of cottages seemed to have survived from the days when Angyalfold had been pastureland and vineyard; from behind the houses came the chatter and musk of goats. Number 18 was a plaster-and-timber cottage with a steep wood-shingled roof and flaking shutters. The window frames were peeling, the door scuffed and toothy along its edge. Winter remnants of ivy traced an unreadable map across the facade. As Andras and Tibor crossed the garden, a high gate at the side of the house opened to let forth a little green cart pulled by two strong white wethers with curving horns. The cart was packed with milk cans and crates of cheese. At the gate stood a tiny woman with a hazel switch in her hand. She wore an embroidered skirt and peasant boots, and her deep-set eyes were hard and bright as polished stones.

She gave Andras a look so penetrating it seemed to touch the back of his skull.

"Does someone with the initial K live here?" he asked her.

"The initial K?" She must have been eighty, but she stood straight-backed against the wind. "Why do you want to know?"

Andras glanced at the ticket scrap on which the woman at the cafe had written the address. "This is 18 Frangepan koz, isn't it?"

"What do you want with K?"

"A friend sent us here."

"What

friend?"

"A woman with two little girls."

"You're Jewish," the old woman said; it was an observation, not a question. And something changed in her features as she said it, a certain softening of the lines around her eyes, an almost imperceptible relaxation of the shoulders.

"That's right," Andras said. "We're Jewish."

"And brothers. He's the elder." She pointed her hazel stick at Tibor.

They both nodded.

The woman lowered her stick and scrutinized Tibor as if she were trying to see beneath his skin. "You're just back from the Munkaszolgalat," she said.

"Yes."

She reached into a basket for a paper-wrapped round of cheese and pressed it into his hand. When he protested, she gave him another.

"K is my grandson," she said. "Miklos Klein. He's a good boy, but he's not a magician. I can't promise he can help you. Talk to him if you like, though. Go to the door.