The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  CANST. I F THY MATES SUFFER FROM OVERWORK THEREFORE, THEY MAY

  GAIN THE PRIVILEGE OF ILLNESS TOO.

  FOLLOW THESE RULES THAT THOU MAYST HAVE TIME TO PREACH

  CONSIDERATION.

  Grudgingly at first, and then with growing enjoyment, Andras illustrated The Snow Goose. For the weather report he drew a series of boxes, each more thickly swarmed with snowflakes. For the fashion column he drew a likeness of Mendel himself, his hair raked upright, his torso swathed toga-style in a ragged gray blanket. On the sports page, three perspiring labor servicemen dragged gravel wagons up a steep hill. The advice column sported a sketch of the saucy, bespectacled Coco, her legs long and bare, a pencil held to her lips. The travel ad for Ukraine showed a beach umbrella planted in the blowing snow. The architecture piece called for an image of the architect pointing proudly at an empty gorge. And the Ten Commandments required only the background sketch of two stone tablets. When he'd finished, he held the work at arm's length and squinted at the drawings. They were the lowest grade of caricature, rendered in haste while the artist lay in bed. But Mendel was right: They suited The Snow Goose perfectly.

  That single copy of the newspaper made its way through the hands of two hundred men, who could soon be heard quoting the Fourth Commandment in the soup line or speculating wistfully about vacations to Ukraine. Andras couldn't keep from feeling a certain proprietary satisfaction, a sensation he hadn't experienced in months.

  Once it was determined that the illustrator who signed himself Parisi was actually Squad Captain Levi, men began to approach him to ask for drawings. The most frequent request was for a nude version of Coco. He drew her on the lid of a man's wooden footlocker, and then in the lining of someone else's cap, and then on a letter to someone's younger brother, holding a sign that said Hi, Sugar! The drawing of Mendel spawned another fad, this one for likenesses; men would line up to have Andras draw their portraits. He wasn't a very good portraitist, but the men didn't seem to care. The roughness of the lines, the charcoal haze around a subject's eyes or chin, captured the essential uncertainty of their lives in the Munkaszolgalat. Mendel Horovitz, too, began receiving requests: He became a kind of professional letter-writer, penning expressions of love and regret and longing that would slip into the turbulent stream of the military mail service, and might or might not reach the wives and brothers and children for whom they were intended.

  When the first issue of The Snow Goose finally disintegrated, Mendel wrote a new one and Andras illustrated it again. Emboldened by the popularity of the earlier edition, they brought their newspaper directly to the office, where there was a mimeograph machine. They offered the company secretary fifteen pengo as a bribe. At the risk of punishment and loss of position the company secretary printed ten copies, which were quickly subsumed into the ranks of the 112/30th. A third issue of thirty copies followed.

  As the men read and laughed over the paper, Andras began to feel as if he had awakened from a long, drugged sleep. He was surprised he'd been so weak, so willing to allow his mind to be overtaken by miserable thoughts and then hollowed to nothingness. Now he was drawing every day. They were absurd little sketches, to be sure, but they oxygenated him, made the effort of breathing seem worthwhile.

  Then, on a raw, wet day in March, Andras and Mendel were summoned to the office of the company commander. The summons came from Major Kalozi's first lieutenant, a scowling, boarlike man by the unfortunate name of Grimasz. At dinnertime he approached Andras and Mendel in the assembly ground and knocked their mess tins from their hands. He held a crumpled copy of the most recent Snow Goose, which contained a love poem from a certain Lieutenant G to a certain Major K, and made other insinuations as to the nature of the relationship between them. Lieutenant Grimasz's face burned red; his neck seemed to have swollen to twice its normal size. He crushed the paper in his blocky fist. The other men took a step back from Andras and Mendel, who were left to absorb the full force of Grimasz's glare.

  "Kalozi wants you in the office," he growled.

  "Right away, Lieutenant, sir," Mendel said, and dared to wink at Andras.

  Grimasz caught the tone, the wink. He raised his hand to cuff Mendel, but Mendel ducked the blow. The men gave a muffled cheer. Grimasz grabbed Mendel by the collar and half shoved, half dragged him to the office, while Andras followed at a run.

  Major Janos Kalozi wasn't a cruel man, but he was ambitious. The son of a Gypsy woman and an itinerant knife-grinder, he'd been promoted through the Munkaszolgalat himself, hoping for a transfer to the gun-carrying branch of the military. He'd been given his present assignment because he had actual knowledge of forestry; he had worked the forests of Transylvania before he'd emigrated to Hungary in the twenties. Andras had never before been called to his office, which was located in the only barracks building that had a porch and its own outhouse. Kalozi had, of course, appropriated the room with the largest window. This had proved to be a mistake. The window, a many-paned affair gleaned from the south-facing wall of a burned farmhouse, smelled of carbon and welcomed the cold. Kalozi had been obliged to cover it with army blankets of the same kind touted in the Fashion Column, rendering the office dark as a cellar. Beneath the smell of carbon was a distinct odor of horse; before the blankets had been put to their current use, they had been stored in a stable. Kalozi sat in the midst of this pungent gloom behind a massive metal desk. A coal brazier kept the place just warm enough to suggest that warm rooms existed and that this was not one of them.

  Andras and Mendel stood at attention while Kalozi glanced through a near-complete set of The Snow Goose, beginning in December 1940 and ending with this week's edition, dated March 7, 1941. Only the disintegrated inaugural issue was lacking.

  The major had grown visibly older in the time he'd directed the 112/30th. The hair at his temples had gone gray and his broad nose had become cobwebbed with tiny red veins. He looked up at Andras and Mendel with the air of a weary school principal.

  "Fun and games," he said, removing his glasses. "Please explain, Squad Captain Levi. Or shall I call you Parisi?"

  "It was my doing, sir," Mendel said. He held his Munkaszolgalat cap in his hands, his thumb working over the brass button at its forward-tilted peak. "I wrote the first issue and asked the squad captain to illustrate it. And we went on from there."

  "You did indeed," Kalozi said. "You gained access to the mimeograph machine and printed dozens of copies."

  "As squad captain I accept full responsibility," Andras said.

  "I'm afraid I can't give you all the credit, Parisi. Our man Horovitz is so very talented, we can't let his efforts go unrecognized." Kalozi turned to an article he'd bookmarked with a bitten pencil. "Change of Leadership at Erdei Camp," he read aloud.

  "The veteran potentate Commander Janika Kalozi the Cross-Eyed, at the behest of Regent Miklos Horthy himself, was deposed from his military appointment this week due to gross ineptitude and disgraceful behavior. In a ceremony at the parade ground he was replaced by a leader deemed more worthy, a male baboon by the name of Rosy Buttocks.

  The commander was escorted from the parade ground amid a deafening chorus of flatulence and applause." He turned the newspaper around to reveal Andras's drawing of the major, cross-eyed, in full uniform on top and ladies' underdrawers beneath, mincing on high heels beside his first lieutenant, an unmistakably boar-headed man, while in the background a florid-assed monkey saluted the assembled work servicemen.

  Andras fought to suppress a grin. He was particularly fond of that drawing.

  "What are you laughing at, Squad Captain?"

  "Nothing, sir," Andras said. He'd known Kalozi for a year and a half now, and understood that he was soft at heart; in fact, he seemed to take a certain pride in his own reluctance to mete out harsh punishment. Andras had hoped Kalozi wouldn't come across that particular issue of The Snow Goose, but he hadn't felt any particular trepidation when he'd drawn the picture.

  "I don't mind a laugh now and then," Kalozi said, "but I
can't have the men ridiculing me. This company will fall into chaos."

  "I understand, sir," Andras said. "We meant no harm."

  "What do you know of harm?" Kalozi said, rising from his chair. A vein had begun to pump at his temple; for the first time since they'd entered the office, Andras felt a stirring of fear. "When I served in the Great War, an officer might have flayed a man who drew something like this."

  "You've always been kind to us," Andras said.

  "That's right. I've coddled you flea-bitten Jews. I've kept you clothed and fed and I've let you loll in bed on cold days and driven you half as hard as I should have. And in return you produce this filth and spread it through the company."

  "Just for laughs, sir," Mendel said.

  "Not any longer. Not at my expense."

  Andras pressed his unsteady teeth with his tongue. The pain radiated deep into his gums, and he fought an urge to turn and flee. But he drew himself up to his full height and met Kalozi's eye "I offer my sincere apologies," he said.

  "Why apologize?" Kalozi said. "In one sense you've done the Munkaszolgalat a great favor. It seems some people have been spreading lies about the gross mistreatment of work servicemen in our national armed forces. A rag like this will be a powerful piece of counterevidence." He rolled a copy of The Snow Goose into a stiff tube. "The work service encourages fellowship and humor, et cetera. Conditions are so humane that you men are free to joke and laugh and make light of your situation. You've even had typewriters, drawing supplies, and mimeograph machines at your disposal. Free speech.

  It's practically French." He grinned, because they all knew what had become of free speech in France.

  "But

  there

  is something I want from you," Kalozi went on. "I think you'll consider it fair, given the situation. Since you've humiliated me publicly, I think it's fitting that you be punished publicly in return."

  Andras swallowed. At his side, Mendel had gone pale. They had both heard rumors of what went on in other labor-service companies, and neither was so naive as to think those things couldn't happen in the 112/30th. Most horrifying was the case of the brother of one of their own workmates, who had been a member of the Debrecen labor battalion. As a punishment for stealing a loaf of bread from the officers' pantry, the man had been stripped naked and buried to his knees in mud; he'd been made to stand there for three days as the weather got progressively colder, until, on the third night, he'd died of exposure.

  "I'm speaking to you, Squad Captain Levi," Kalozi said. "Look at me. Don't hang your head like a dog."

  Andras raised his eyes to Kalozi's. The major didn't blink. "I've thought long and hard about an appropriate punishment," he said. "As it happens, I'm rather fond of you boys. You've both been good workers. But you've shamed me. You've shamed me in front of my men. And so, Levi and Horovitz"--here Kalozi paused for effect, tapping his rolled-up copy of The Snow Goose against the desk--"I'm afraid you will have to eat your words."

  That was how Andras and Mendel came to find themselves stripped to their underclothes, their hands manacled behind their backs, kneeling before the assembled 112/30th at six o'clock on a cold March morning. Ten issues of The Snow Goose lay on a bench before them. While the labor servicemen watched, Lieutenant Grimasz tore off strips of the newspaper, crumpled them up, dunked them in water, and stuffed them into the mouths of co-publishers Levi and Horovitz. Over a period of two hours they were each forced to eat twenty pages of The Snow Goose. As Andras clenched his teeth against Grimasz's prodding hands, he began to understand for the first time what a comfortable and protected life he had led, relatively speaking, in the Munkaszolgalat. He had never before had his hands bound behind his back, or been forced to kneel coatless and pant-less in the snow for hours on end; he had, in fact, been fed and clothed and housed, his miseries eased by the knowledge that all the men of Company 112/30 were suffering similar miseries. Now he became aware of a new kind of hell, one he could scarcely allow himself to imagine. He knew that what was happening here, on the grand continuum of punishment, might still be classed as relatively humane; far off down that tunnel existed punishments that could make a man long for death. He forced himself to chew and swallow, chew and swallow, telling himself it was the only way to get through the hideous thing that was happening to him. Somewhere after the fifteenth page he tasted blood in his mouth and spat out a molar. His gums, spongy with scurvy, had finally begun to give up their teeth. He screwed his eyes shut and ate paper and ate paper and ate paper until finally he lost consciousness, and then he collapsed into the cold wet shock of the snow.

  He was dragged to the infirmary and placed in the care of the company's only doctor, a man named Baruch Imber, whose sole purpose in life had become to save labor servicemen from the ravages of the labor service. Imber nursed Andras and Mendel for five days in the infirmary, and when they had recovered from hypothermia and forced paper consumption, he diagnosed them both with advanced scurvy and anemia and sent them home to Budapest for treatment in the military hospital, to be followed by a two-week furlough.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Furlough

  AFTER A WEEK-LONG train journey, during which their hair became infested with lice and their skin began to flake and bleed, they were transferred to an ambulance van that held sick and dying work servicemen. The floor of the van was lined with hay, but the men shivered in their coarse wool blankets. There were eight men in the van, most of whom were far worse off than Andras and Mendel. A man with tuberculosis had a massive tumor at his hip, another man had been blinded when a stove exploded, a third had a mouth full of abscesses. Andras put his head out the open back windows of the van as they entered Budapest. The sight of ordinary city life--of streetcars and pastry shops, boys and girls out for an evening, movie marquees with their clean black letters--filled him with unreasonable fury, as if it were all a mockery of his time in the Munkaszolgalat.

  The van pulled up at the military hospital and the patients walked or were carried to a registration hall, where Andras and Mendel waited all night on a cold bench while hundreds of workers and soldiers had their names and numbers recorded in an official ledger. Sometime in the early morning, Mendel was inscribed in the hospital book and taken away to be bathed and treated. It was another two hours before they came to Andras, but at last, dazed with exhaustion, he found himself following a male nurse to a shower room, where the man stripped him of his filthy clothes, shaved his head, sprayed him with a burning disinfectant, and stood him in a torrent of hot water. The nurse washed his bruised skin all over with a kind of impersonal tenderness, a knowing forbearance for the failings of the human body. The man dried him and led him to a long ward heated by radiators that ran its entire length. Andras was shown to a narrow metal bed, and for the first time in a year and a half he slept on a real mattress, between real sheets. When he awoke after what seemed only a few moments, Klara was there at his bedside, her eyes red and raw. He pushed himself upright, took her hands, demanded the terrible news: Who had died? What new tragedy had befallen them?

  "Andraska," she said, in a voice fractured with pity; and he understood that he was the tragedy, that she was weeping over what remained of him. He didn't know how much weight he'd lost in the work service, on that diet of coffee and soup and hard bread-

  -only that he'd had to keep cinching the belt of his trousers tighter, and that his bones had become more prominent beneath the skin. His arms and legs were roped with the wiry muscles he'd built from the constant labor; even through the previous winter's depression he'd never actually felt weak. But he saw how little his body disturbed the blanket that was pulled over him. He could only imagine how bony and strange he must look in his hospital pajamas, with his blood-blotched arms and his shaved head. He almost wished Klara had stayed away until he looked like a man again. He lowered his eyes and held his own elbows in what felt like self-protection. He watched her fold her hands in her lap; there was the gold glint of her wedding band. The ring was
still smooth and reflective, her hands as white as they'd been when he'd last seen her. His own ring was scratched to dullness, his hands brown and cracked with work.

  "The doctor's been here," Klara said. "He says you'll be all right. But you've got to take vitamin C and iron and have a long rest."

  "I don't need rest," Andras said, determined that she should see him on his feet.

  He wasn't wounded or crippled, after all. He swung his legs off the bed and planted his feet on the cool linoleum. But then a wave of dizziness hit him, and he put a hand to his head.

  "You have to eat," she said. "You've been asleep for twenty hours."

  "I

  have?"

  "I'm to give you some vitamin tablets and some broth, and later some bread."

  "Oh, Klara," he said, and lowered his head into his hands. "Just leave me alone here. I'm a horror."

  She sat down on the bed next to him and put her arms around him. Her smell was vaguely different--he detected a hint of lilac soap or hair-dressing, something that reminded him of the long-ago Eva Kereny, his first love in Debrecen. She kissed his dry lips and put her head on his shoulder. He let her hold him, too exhausted to resist.

  "Have some respect, Squad Captain," came a voice from across the ward. It was Mendel, lying in his own clean bed. He, too, had had his head shaved bare.