The InvisibleBridge

Tibor opened his leather satchel now and took out the jersey, gray yarn knitted in close regular stitches. He laid it on his knees and smoothed the wool. “Do you know what the worst of it was?” he said. “When Keresztes left the room, he rolled his eyes at me. What fools, these fanatics. I know the mother saw him.” He rested his chin on his hand, regarding Andras with an expression so laced with pain as to make Andras’s throat constrict. “The worst of it was, all my sympathies lay with Keresztes at that moment. I should have wanted to beat him to a pulp for rolling his eyes at a time like that, but all I could think was, My God, how long is this going to take? How soon can we get these people out of here?”

Andras could only nod in understanding. He knew Tibor didn’t need reassurance that he was a good man, that under different circumstances his sympathies would have lain with the parents instead of with the exhausted surgeon; he and his brother had perfect comprehension of each other’s minds and inward lives. Simply to have heard the story was enough. A long silence settled between them as they drank their beer. Then, finally, Tibor spoke again.

“I had a piece of good news on my way out of the hospital,” he said. “One of the nurses caught it on the radio. The generals from the Délvidék massacres, Feketehalmy-Czeydner and the others, are going to jail this Monday. Feketehalmy-Czeydner’s in for fifteen years, I understand, and the others nearly as many. Let’s hope they rot there.”

Andras didn’t have the heart to tell his brother the rest of that story, which he’d heard just before Tibor had arrived at the newsroom: Feketehalmy-Czeydner and the three other officers convicted in the Délvidék case, facing the start of their long prison sentences, had fled that very day to Vie

“To rotting in jail,” he said, and raised his glass.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT. Occupation

IN MARCH of 1944, not long after Klara had discovered she was pregnant again, the papers would report that Horthy had been called to Schloss Klessheim for a conference with Hitler. With him went the new minister of defense, Lajos Csatay, who had replaced Vilmos Nagy; and Ferenc Szombathelyi, chief of the General Staff. Prime Minister Kállay proclaimed to the newspapers that the Magyar nation had reason to be hopeful: What Hitler wanted to discuss was the withdrawal of Hungarian troops from the Eastern Front. Tibor speculated that this turn of events might bring Mátyás home at last when all else had failed to do so.

The evening of the Klessheim conference found Andras and József at the Pineapple Club, the underground cabaret near Vörösmarty tér where Mátyás had once danced on the lid of a white piano. The piano was still there; at the keyboard was Berta Türk, a vaudevillian of the old school, whose snaky coiffure called to mind a Beardsleyesque Medusa. József had received tickets to the show as payment for a house-painting job. Berta Türk had been an adolescent fad of his; he couldn’t resist the chance to see her, and he insisted that Andras accompany him. He lent Andras a silk di

“Got a light?” a man asked him.

Andras blinked the moon away and shook his head. The man, a dark-haired young soldier in a Hungarian Army uniform, begged a match from a passerby and lit his friend’s cigarette, then his own.

“It’s true, I tell you,” the man’s friend said. “If Markus says there’s going to be an occupation, there’ll be an occupation.”

“Your cousin’s a fascist. He’d love nothing more than a German occupation. But he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Horthy and Hitler are negotiating as we speak.”

“Precisely! It’s a distraction tactic.”

Everyone had a theory; every man who had returned alive from the Eastern Front thought he knew how the war would unfold, on the large scale and the small. Every theory seemed as plausible as the last, or as implausible; every amateur military theorist believed just as fiercely that he alone could beat order from the chaos of the war. Andras and Tibor, József and Polaner, were all guilty of bearing that illusion. Each had his own set of theories, and each believed the others to be hopelessly misguided. How long, Andras wondered, could they keep building arguments based on reason when the war defied reason at every turn? How long before they all fell silent? It might even be true that the Germans were carrying out an occupation of Hungary that very moment; anything might be true, anything at all. Mátyás himself might be jumping from the mouth of a boxcar at Keleti Station, slinging his knapsack over his shoulder, and heading to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca.

Through a haze of coconut-scented rum, Andras drifted back inside and wandered toward their table beside the stage, where József had engaged Madame Türk’s attention and was paying his compliments. Madame Türk, it seemed, was saying farewell for the evening; a piece of urgent news had made it necessary for her to leave at once. She suffered József to kiss her hand, tucked one of his roses behind her ear, and swept off across the stage.

“What was the piece of news?” Andras asked when she’d gone.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” József said, afloat on his own delight. He insisted they have another round of drinks before they left, and suggested they take a cab home. But when Andras reminded him what he’d already spent that evening, József allowed himself to be led to the streetcar stop on Vámház körút, where a noisy crowd had gathered to wait for the tram.

By that time everyone seemed to have heard the same set of rumors: A transport of SS troops, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand of them, had arrived at a station near the capital, were marching east, and would soon breach the city limits. Armored and motorized German divisions were said to have advanced into Hungary from every direction; the airports at Ferihegy and Debrecen had been occupied. When the streetcar arrived, the ticket girl proclaimed loudly that if any German soldier tried to board her car, she’d spit in his face and tell him where to go. A bawdy cheer rose from the passengers. Someone started singing “Isten, áld meg a Magyart,” and then everyone was shouting the national anthem as the streetcar rolled down Vámház körut.