The Invisible Bridge, Page 2

  The elder Mrs. Hasz nodded in return. "So you've agreed to take a box to Jozsef,"

  she said. "That was very kind of you. I'm sure you have a great deal to think about already."

  "It's no trouble at all."

  "We won't keep you long," said the younger Mrs. Hasz. "Simon is packing the last items now. I'll ring for something to eat in the meantime. You look famished."

  "Oh, no, please don't bother," Andras said. In fact, the smell of toast had reminded him that he hadn't eaten all day; but he worried that even the smallest meal in that house would require a lengthy ceremony, one whose rules were foreign to him. And he was in a hurry: His train left in three hours.

  "Young men can always eat," said the younger Mrs. Hasz, calling the housemaid to her side. She gave a few instructions and sent the woman on her way.

  The elder Mrs. Hasz left her chair at the writing desk and beckoned Andras to sit beside her on one of the salmon-colored sofas. He sat down, worrying that his trousers would leave a mark on the silk; he would have needed a different grade of clothing altogether, it seemed to him, to pass an hour safely in that house. The elder Mrs. Hasz folded her slim hands on her lap and asked Andras what he would study in Paris.

  "Architecture," Andras said.

  "Indeed. So you'll be a classmate of Jozsef's at the Beaux-Arts, then?"

  "I'll be at the Ecole Speciale," Andras said. "Not the Beaux-Arts."

  The younger Mrs. Hasz settled herself on the opposite sofa. "The Ecole Speciale?

  I haven't heard Jozsef mention it."

  "It's rather more of a trade school than the Beaux-Arts," Andras said. "That's what I understand, anyway. I'll be there on a scholarship from the Izraelita Hitkozseg. It was a happy accident, actually."

  "An

  accident?"

  And Andras explained: The editor of Past and Future, the magazine where he worked, had submitted some of Andras's cover designs for an exhibition in Paris--a show of work by young Central European artists. His covers had been selected and exhibited; a professor from the Ecole Speciale had seen the show and had made inquiries about Andras. The editor had told him that Andras wanted to become an architect, but that it was difficult for Jewish students to get into architecture school in Hungary: A defunct numerus clausus, which in the twenties had restricted the number of Jewish students to six percent, still haunted the admissions practices of Hungarian universities. The professor from the Ecole Speciale had written letters, had petitioned his admissions board to give Andras a place in the incoming class. The Budapest Jewish community association, the Izraelita Hitkozseg, had put up the money for tuition, room, and board. It had all happened in a matter of weeks, and at every moment it seemed as if it might fall through. But it hadn't; he was going. His classes would begin six days from now.

  "Ah," said the younger Mrs. Hasz. "How fortunate! And a scholarship, too!" But at the last words she lowered her eyes, and Andras experienced the return of a feeling from his school days in Debrecen: a sudden shame, as if he'd been stripped to his underclothes. A few times he'd spent weekend afternoons at the homes of boys who lived in town, whose fathers were barristers or bankers, who didn't have to board with poor families--boys who slept alone in their beds at night and wore ironed shirts to school and ate lunch at home every day. Some of these boys' mothers treated him with solicitous pity, others with polite distaste. In their presence he'd felt similarly naked. Now he forced himself to look at Jozsef's mother as he said, "Yes, it's very lucky."

  "And where will you live in Paris?"

  He rubbed his damp palms against his knees. "The Latin Quarter, I suppose."

  "But where will you stay when you arrive?"

  "I imagine I'll just ask someone where students take rooms."

  "Nonsense," said the elder Mrs. Hasz, covering his hand with her own. "You'll go to Jozsef's, that's what you'll do."

  The younger Mrs. Hasz gave a cough and smoothed her hair. "We shouldn't make commitments for Jozsef," she said. "He may not have room for a guest."

  "Oh, Elza, you're a terrible snob," said the elder Mrs. Hasz. "Mr. Levi is doing a service for Jozsef. Surely Jozsef can spare a sofa for him, at least for a few days. We'll wire him this afternoon."

  "Here are the sandwiches," said the younger, visibly relieved by the distraction.

  The housemaid wheeled a tea cart into the room. In addition to the tea service there was a glass cake stand with a stack of sandwiches so pale they looked to be made of snow. A pair of scissorlike silver tongs lay beside the pedestal, as if to suggest that sandwiches like these were not meant to be touched by human hands. The elder Mrs.

  Hasz took up the tongs and piled sandwiches onto Andras's plate, more than he would have dared to take for himself. When the younger Mrs. Hasz herself picked up a sandwich without the aid of silverware or tongs, Andras made bold to eat one of his own.

  It consisted of dilled cream cheese on soft white bread from which the crusts had been cut. Paper-thin slices of yellow pepper provided the only indication that the sandwich had originated from within the borders of Hungary.

  While the younger Mrs. Hasz poured Andras a cup of tea, the elder went to the writing desk and withdrew a white card upon which she asked Andras to write his name and travel information. She would wire Jozsef, who would be waiting at the station in Paris. She offered him a glass pen with a gold nib so fine he was afraid to use it. He leaned over the low table and wrote the information in his blocky print, terrified that he would break the nib or drip ink onto the Persian rug. Instead he inked his fingers, a fact he apprehended only when he looked down at his final sandwich and saw that the bread was stained purple. He wondered how long it would be until Simon, whoever that was, appeared with the box for Jozsef. A sound of hammering came from far off down the hallway; he hoped it was the box being closed.

  It seemed to please the elder Mrs. Hasz to see that Andras had finished his sandwiches. She gave him her grief-etched smile. "This will be your first time in Paris, then."

  "Yes," Andras said. "My first time out of the country."

  "Don't let my grandson offend you," she said. "He's a sweet child once you get to know him."

  "Jozsef is a perfect gentleman," said the younger Mrs. Hasz, flushing to the roots of her close-set curls.

  "It's kind of you to wire him," Andras said.

  "Not at all," said the elder Mrs. Hasz. She wrote Jozsef's address on another card and gave it to Andras. A moment later, a man in butler's livery entered the sitting room with an enormous wooden crate in his arms.

  "Thank you, Simon," said the younger Mrs. Hasz. "You may leave it there."

  The man set the crate down on the rug and retreated. Andras glanced at the gold clock on the mantel. "Thank you for the sandwiches," he said. "I'd better be off now."

  "Stay another moment, if you don't mind," said the elder Mrs. Hasz. "I'd like to ask you to take one more thing." She went to the writing desk and slid the sealed letter from beneath its paperweight.

  "Excuse me, Mr. Levi," said the younger. She rose and crossed the room to meet her mother-in-law, and put a hand on her arm. "We've already discussed this."

  "I won't repeat myself, then," said the elder Mrs. Hasz, lowering her voice.

  "Kindly remove your hand, Elza."

  The younger Mrs. Hasz shook her head. "Gyorgy would agree with me. It's unwise."

  "My son is a good man, but he doesn't always know what's wise and what is not,"

  said the elder. She extricated her arm gently from the younger woman's grasp, returned to the salmon-colored sofa, and handed the envelope to Andras. Written on its face was the name C. MORGENSTERN and an address in Paris.

  "It's a message for a family friend," said the elder Mrs. Hasz, her eyes steady on Andras's. "Perhaps you'll think me overcautious, but for certain matters I don't trust the Hungarian post. Things can get lost, you know, or fall into the wrong hands." She kept her gaze fixed upon him as she spoke, seeming to ask him not to question what she meant, nor what mat
ters might be delicate enough to require this degree of caution. "If you please, I'd rather you not mention it to anyone. Particularly not to my grandson. Just buy a stamp and drop this into a mailbox once you get to Paris. You'll be doing me a great favor."

  Andras put the letter into his breast pocket. "Easily done," he said.

  The younger Mrs. Hasz stood rigid beside the writing desk, her cheeks bright beneath their patina of powder. One hand still rested on the stack of books, as though she might call the letter back across the room and have it there again. But there was nothing to be done, Andras saw; the elder Mrs. Hasz had won, and the younger now had to proceed as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She composed her expression and smoothed her gray skirt, returning to the sofa where Andras sat.

  "Well," she said, and folded her hands. "It seems we've concluded our business. I hope my son will be a help to you in Paris."

  "I'm certain he will," Andras said. "Is that the box you'd like me to take?"

  "It is," said the younger Mrs. Hasz, and gestured him toward it.

  The wooden crate was large enough to contain a pair of picnic hampers. When Andras lifted it, he felt a deep tug in his intestines. He took a few staggering steps toward the door.

  "Dear me," said the younger Mrs. Hasz. "Can you manage?"

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Western Europe Express

  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 t
horoughly, 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.