The InvisibleBridge

Listen,
How quickly your heart is beating in me.
– Wislawa Szymborska

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.

They lived, and he loved her. It was was folly in the French sense-madness-to keep her at a remove. It was the last thing he wanted

the way he imagined Mendel Horovitz or the Ivory Tower or his brother Mátyás, each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain-to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time-how could anyone begin to grasp it?

envision each man and woman and child inside as a unique and irreplaceable human being

But in the end there was no need for a show of force. Zoltán Novak, former husband and father, former director of the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt and the Budapest Operaház, the man Klara Morgenstern had loved for eleven years and in some measure must have loved still, fell asleep that night and did not wake again.

He swallowed the knot of coarse rope that had lodged itself in his throat, and drew an arm across his eyes. He would not mourn, he told himself. Not until he knew.

He could not grasp that stunning absolute. He could not breathe, could not think. In his head, the Ninety-first Psalm, the flash and crack of gunshots, the sound of shovels against cold earth.

But he could not make himself believe that the body beside the wall belonged to Mendel Horovitz, could not believe that this man he’d loved since boyhood had been killed.

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.