The Invisible Bridge (97 page)

"Time to go," she said now. "Matyas will be waiting."

Andras helped her into her gray coat and draped a cinnamon-colored scarf around her neck. "You're as lovely as ever," he said, touching her sleeve. "You used to wear a red hat in Paris. You'll have one again in America."

"As ever!" she said. "Has it come to that? Am I so old?"

"Ageless," he said. "Timeless."

They met Matyas at the corner of Pozsonyi ut and Szent Istvan korut. In honor of the occasion he had worn a pink carnation in his buttonhole, a gesture that seemed to recall his younger self. He had returned from Siberia hardened and sharpened into a man, a fierce aggressive light radiating from his eyes. He had never returned to dancing, would never again wear a top hat, white tie, and tails. The part of him that had been inclined toward the physical expression of joy had been carved away in Siberia. But now, on the day of the name change, a pink carnation.

Klara pressed Andras's arm as they crossed Perczel Mor utca. "I brought the camera," she said. "I hope you're feeling photogenic."

"As ever," said Andras, who detested any photograph of himself. But Matyas straightened the carnation in his buttonhole and struck a pose against a streetlight.

"Not yet," Klara said. "After we get the documents."

They arrived at the gray monolith that housed the Ministry of the Interior--a building, Andras recalled, that stood in the footprint of the eighteenth-century palace of a famous courtesan. The palace had been destroyed in the siege of 1944, but a single elm that appeared in engravings of the building still stood behind its low iron fence. Andras touched the bark as if for luck, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a city where he would not see ghosts of buildings and people everywhere he looked, where what existed now was all there was for him. Then he and Matyas and Klara climbed the steps and entered the glass-and-concrete cavern of the building. They waited for an hour while the man in charge of name changes fingered his way through an endless series of documents, each of which had to be stamped thrice and signed by elusive functionaries before it could be delivered. But finally their name was called--their old name, one last time--and they had the papers in hand: new identification cards and work cards and residency certificates. Documents, Andras hoped, that would soon be of no use to them at all. But it had seemed important to know that the new name had been recorded in Hungarian record books, important that it be made official.

Outside, the high blue sky had gone metallic gray, and they stepped into a cloud of falling snow. Klara ran down the steps to prepare the camera while Andras and Matyas stood with the new documents in their hands. Andras had not expected the sight of the cards and papers to bring tears to his eyes, but now he found himself weeping. It had become real at last: this memorial, this mark they would carry all their lives and pass to their children and grandchildren.

"Stop that," Matyas said, drawing the back of his sleeve across his own eyes. "It won't change anything."

He was right, of course. Nothing would change what had happened--not grief, not time, not memory, not retribution. But they could leave this place, would leave it in a few weeks. They could cross an ocean and live in a city where Aprilis might grow up without the gravity that had marked her brother, without the sense of tragedy that seemed to hang in the air like the brown dust of bituminous coal. And Andras would become a student again--if not the young man who had arrived in Paris with a suitcase and a scholarship, then a man who knew something more of both the beauty and the ugliness of the world.

And Klara would be with him--Klara, who stood before them now with her dark hair blowing, her hands raised, the camera hiding her face behind its glass eye. He put his arm around his brother and said, "Ready." She counted to three in English, a daring act in the shadow of the Ministry of the Interior. And she captured them, the two men on the steps: Andras and Matyas Tibor.

IN THE SPRING, on afternoons when she didn't have soccer practice, she would skip her last class--orchestra--and take the 6 uptown to her grandfather's building. She thought of it that way, his building, though he didn't live there or own it. It was a four-story building set at an angle to the street; the facade was made up of hundreds of small rectangles of steel-framed glass, shunted skyward in a violent and asymmetrical upward thrust, like an exploding Japanese screen. Slim birches grew in the trapezoid of earth between building and sidewalk. The marble lintel above the door read A MOS M

USEUM OF C ONTEMPORARY A RT; her grandfather's name was chiseled into the cornerstone, above the word A RCHITECT. The building housed a small collection of paintings and sculptures and photographs she'd seen a thousand times. In its central courtyard was a cafe where she always ordered her coffee black. At thirteen she considered herself on the cusp of womanhood. She liked to sit at a table and write letters to her brother at Brown, or to her friends from camp in the Berkshires. She would sit for hours, almost until dinnertime, and then she would run to catch the express, hoping to make it back to the apartment before her parents got home from work.

Her grandparents didn't live in the city. They lived upstate, down the road from her great-uncle, and five miles away from the man whom she called uncle but who was her grandfather's friend. Sometimes she went to visit them on weekends. Three hours by train, which passed quickly if you had a window seat. Her grandfather had a barn he'd converted into a workshop, with high windows that let in northern light. They all worked there still, her grandfather and her great-uncle and her not-uncle uncle, though they were old enough to retire. They let her sit at their sloping desks and use their ink-stained tools.

She liked to draw oblique entryways, fractured rooflines, curvilinear facades. They gave her books about architects they'd known, Le Corbusier and Pingusson. They taught her the Latin names of arches and showed her how to use the French curve and the beam compass. They taught her the single-stroke Roman lettering they used to label their plans.

They had lived through the war. Every now and then it drifted into their speech:
During the war
, and then a story about how little they'd had to eat, or how they'd survived the cold, or how long they'd gone without seeing each other. She'd learned about that war in school, of course--who had died, who killed whom, how, and why--though her books hadn't had much to say about Hungary. She'd learned other things about the war from watching her grandmother, who saved plastic bags and glass jars, and kept bottles of water in the house in case of disaster, and made layer cakes with half as much butter and sugar as the recipes called for, and who, at times, would begin to cry for no reason. And she'd learned about it from her father, who'd been hardly more than a baby at the time but who could remember walking with his mother through ruins.

There were strands of darker stories. She didn't know how she'd heard them; she thought she must have absorbed them through her skin, like medicine or poison.

Something about labor camps. Something about being made to eat newspapers.

Something about a disease that came from lice. Even when she wasn't thinking about those half stories, they did their work in her mind. A few weeks ago she'd had a dream from which she'd woken shouting in fright. She and her parents had been standing in a cold black-walled room, wearing pajamas made of flour sacks. In a corner her grandmother knelt on the concrete floor, weeping. Her grandfather stood before them, too thin, unshaven. A German guard came out of the shadows and made him climb onto a raised conveyor belt, something like the luggage carousel at the airport. The guard put cuffs around his ankles and wrists, then stepped to a wooden lever beside the conveyor belt and pushed it forward. A meshing of gears, a grinding of iron teeth. The belt began to move. Her grandfather rounded a corner and disappeared into a rectangle of light, from beyond which came a deafening clap that meant he was dead.

That was when she'd shouted herself awake.

Her parents had come running into the room.
What is it? What is it?

You don't want to know.

Today she sat in the courtyard with her notebook and her bitter coffee, the first time she'd been there since the dream. It was a deep blue afternoon, sun slanting through the courtyard in a way that reminded her of the north woods and camp. But she couldn't stop thinking about the conveyor belt and that deafening shock of noise. She couldn't concentrate on writing to her brother. She couldn't drink her coffee, or even take a deep breath. She reminded herself that her grandfather wasn't dead. Her grandmother wasn't dead. And her great-uncle, and the uncle who wasn't her uncle--none of them were dead.

Even her father had survived, and his sister, her aunt Aprilis, who'd been born in the middle of it all.

But then there was the other great-uncle, the one who had died. He'd had a wife, and his son would have been her father's age now. They had all died in the war. Her grandparents almost never talked about them, and when they did, they spoke in lowered voices. All that was left of that uncle was a photograph taken when he was twenty years old. He was handsome, with a strong jaw and heavy dark hair, and he wore a pair of silver-framed glasses. He didn't look like someone who expected to die. He looked like he was supposed to live to be a white-haired old man like his brothers.

Instead there was just that photograph. And their last name, a memorial.

She wanted to hear the whole story: what that brother had been like as a boy, what he'd been good at in school, what he'd wanted to do with his life, where he'd lived, who he'd loved, how he'd died. If her own brother died, she would tell her granddaughter everything about him. If her granddaughter asked.

Maybe that was the problem: She hadn't asked. Or maybe even now they didn't want to talk about it. But she would ask, next time she went to visit. It seemed right that they should tell her, now that she was thirteen. She wasn't a child anymore. She was old enough now to know.

Any Case

It could have happened.

It had to happen.

It happened earlier. Later.

Closer. Farther away.

It happened, but not to you.

You survived because you were first.

You survived because you were last.

Because alone. Because the others.

Because on the left. Because on the right.

Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.

Because a shadow fell.

Luckily there was a forest.

Luckily there were no trees.

Luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,

a frame, a turn, an inch, a second.

Luckily a straw was floating on the water.

Thanks to, thus, in spite of, and yet.

What would have happened if a hand, a leg,

One step, a hair away?

So you are here? Straight from that moment still suspended?

The net's mesh was tight, but you? through the mesh?

I can't stop wondering at it, can't be silent enough.

Listen,

How quickly your heart is beating in me.

--Wislawa

Szymborska

translated from the Polish by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds

Deepest gratitude to everyone who helped bring this novel to its final state. The National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library provided invaluable gifts of time and freedom.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris, the library of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture, the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center, and the National Jewish Museum of Budapest gave me access to artifacts and documents that made the history tangible. Zsuzsa Toronyi of the National Hungarian Jewish Archives in Budapest led me to the Munkaszolgalat newspapers, and Gabor Nagy was a subtle and insightful translator. CUNY professor emeritus Randolph Braham documented the Hungarian Holocaust in his career-long study of the subject, and particularly in
The
Politics of Genocide
, which was an infallible guide; on a snowy day in February he met with me to answer questions of geography and Hungarian military ranking. The USC

Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education provided many hours of videotaped interviews. Killian O'Sullivan gave detailed architectural advice. Professor Brian Porter at the University of Michigan offered insight into twentieth-century Central European politics and history. Kenneth Turan answered my Yiddish questions. Alice Hudson at the New York Public Library unearthed wartime maps of Budapest and Paris.

Professor Edgar Rosenberg at Cornell led me to Gerald Schwab's
The Day the Holocaust
Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan
.

Jordan Pavlin at Knopf offered unflagging patience, encouragement, and the most sensitive and painstaking editing. Kimberly Witherspoon championed this project from the beginning. Sonny Mehta gave me the great gift of his confidence. Mary Mount edited the novel from a European perspective. My copy editor, Kate Norris, went far beyond the call of duty. Leslie Levine responded with calm grace to every query.

Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman were dazzlingly generous readers, editors, and friends. Brian Seibert lent me his sharp editorial eye, guidance on matters of dance, and courage when my own flagged. Daniel Orringer was a tireless source of medical detail, and Amy Orringer was an excellent travel partner and a fearless, nonjudgmental early reader. Carl and Linda Orringer gave their love, support, and unwavering belief in this project. Tom Tibor sent his meticulously researched writings about our family's experience. Judy Brodt shared her memories and her knowledge of Jewish observance.

Tibor Schenk described his wartime experiences at Bor and led me to Munkaszolgalat websites. Christa Parravani walked into a ruin with me to take photographs.