The Invisible Bridge (92 page)

"No, Tibor. If you stay, you'll get sick for certain." He thought of Matyas, 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 Jozsef 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. Tamas 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 Jozsef were dying.
Flecktyphus
, he kept hearing, and
dizenteria
. One day Tibor had returned from town to find Andras and Jozsef 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 Jozsef 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 Jozsef 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--Jozsef?--that Andras was near the end.

Tibor kneeling by his side, reminding him that today was Tamas'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 Murzzuschlag, 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 Jozsef? 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. Jozsef Hasz was bending over him, urging him to sit up. "Give it a try," Jozsef 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 Jozsef kneeling beside him, supporting his back with both hands.

"You're going to have to stand now," Jozsef 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?"

Jozsef shook his head. "Just me."

"Where's

my

brother,

Jozsef?

Where's my brother?"

"They've been desperate for workers," Jozsef said. "If a man can stand, they take him."

"Who?"

"The

Germans."

"They

took

Tibor?"

"I don't know, Andraska," Jozsef 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," Jozsef said.

Tears came to Andras's eyes: To die now, after everything. But Jozsef took him from beneath the arms and hoisted him to his feet. Andras fell against him. Jozsef 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 Jozsef's feet were bare.

The officer cleared his throat. "All those who want to work, step forward."

All the men stepped forward. Jozsef 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 mochte
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 Jozsef'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 Jozsef until the wagon arrived. The Nazi officer quick-stepped alongside the wagon, carrying a pair of boots. He helped Andras and Jozsef 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 Jozsef--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 Kaposvar, 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 Jozsef, 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, Jozsef touched Andras's shoulder and pointed toward a line of vehicles speeding along the military road beyond the barbed-wire fence.

"See that?" Jozsef said. "I don't think we're going to work today."

Andras raised his eyes. "Why not?"

"Look." He pointed along the curve of the road as it bent away toward the east. A confusion of German and Hungarian armored vehicles bumped along the rutted track, some leaving the roadbed to pass, others getting mired in the deep mud of the road, or spinning out of control into the ditches. Behind them, as far as Andras could see, a line of sleeker, swifter tanks barreled in their direction: Soviet T-34s, the kind he'd seen in Ukraine and Subcarpathia. That explained why their work foreman still hadn't appeared, though it was half past seven: The Russians had come at last, and the Germans and Hungarians were running for their lives. At that moment the camp loudspeaker broadcast a command for all inmates to return to their quarters, gather their belongings, and meet at the camp gates to await orders for redeployment. But Jozsef sat down just where he was and crossed his legs before him.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said, "Not a step. If the Russians are coming, I'm going to sit here and wait."

The announcement raised a shout from the other men, some of whom threw their caps in the air. They stood in the assembly yard and watched their Nazi guards and work foremen flee the camp, some on foot, others in jeeps or trucks. No one seemed to take notice of the few men who'd gathered with their belongings near the gate. No further orders came over the loudspeaker; anyone who might have given orders had gone. Some of the inmates hid in the barracks, but Andras and Jozsef and many of the others climbed a low hill and watched a battle unfold in the neighboring fields. A battalion of German tanks had turned to meet the Soviets, and the cannons barked and roared for hours. All day and into the night they watched and cheered the Red Army. After dark, gunfire made an aurora in the eastern sky. Somewhere beyond that peony-colored light was the border of Hungary, and beyond that the road that led to Budapest.

At dawn the next day, a Soviet detachment arrived to take charge of the camp.

The soldiers wore gray jackets and mud-smeared blue breeches. Their boots were miraculously intact, and their leather straps and belts gleamed with polish. They stopped just outside the gates and their captain made an announcement in Russian over a megaphone. The men of the camp had anticipated this moment. They'd made white flags from the canvas sacks that held cement dust, and had tied the flags to slender linden branches. A group of Russian-speaking prisoners, Carpathians from a Slovak border town, approached the Soviets with the branches held high. The absurdity of it, Andras thought--those gaunt and grief-shocked men carrying flags of surrender, as though they might be mistaken for their captors. The Soviets had brought a cartload of coarse black bread, which they distributed among the men. They broke the locks of the storehouses from which the camp officers had supplied themselves; after they'd taken as much as their cart could hold, they indicated that the prisoners should take whatever they wanted.