The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  Andras raised his hand and waved. "My apologies, Serviceman," he said. It gave him a feeling of vertigo to be here in a military hospital with Mendel Horovitz, and to have Klara beside him at the same time. His head ached. He lay back against his pillow and let Klara give him his vitamins and broth. His wife. Klara Levi. He opened his eyes to look at her, at the familiar sweep of her hair across her brow, the lean strength of her arms, the way she pressed her lips inward as she concentrated, her deep gray eyes resting on him, on him, at last.

  It didn't take him long to understand that the furlough was another form of torture, a lesson that had to be learned in preparation for a more difficult test. Before, when he'd gotten his call-up notice, he'd had only the vaguest idea of what it might mean to be separated from Klara. Now he knew. In the face of that misery, two weeks seemed an impossibly short time.

  His furlough began officially when he was released from the military hospital, three days after he had entered it. Klara had had his uniform laundered and mended, and on the day of his release she brought him the miraculous gift of a new pair of boots. He had new underclothes, new socks, a new peaked cap with a shining brass button at the front. He felt more than a little ashamed to appear in front of Mendel Horovitz in those fine clean clothes. Mendel had no one to take care of him. He was unmarried, and his mother had died when he was a boy; his father was still in Zalaszabar. As he stood with Andras and Klara near the hospital gate, waiting for the streetcar, Andras asked him how he planned to spend the furlough.

  Mendel shrugged. "An old roommate of mine still lives in Budapest. I can stay with him."

  Klara touched Andras's arm, and they exchanged a glance. It was a difficult thing to decide without discussion; it had been so long since they'd been alone together. But Mendel was an old friend, and during their time in the 112/30th he'd become Andras's family. They both knew Andras had to make the offer.

  "We're going to my parents' house in the country," he said. "There's room, if you'd like to come. Nothing fancy. But I'm certain my mother would take good care of you."

  The shadows around Mendel's eyes deepened into an expression of gratitude. "It's good of you, Parisi," he said.

  So that morning it was the three of them together on the train to Konyar. They rode past Maglod, past Tapiogyorgy, past Ujszasz, into the Hajdu flatlands, sharing a thermos of coffee among them and eating cherry strudel. The tart sweetness of the fruit nearly brought tears to Andras's eyes. He took Klara's hand and pressed it between his own; she met his gaze and he felt she understood him. She was a person who knew something about shock, about returning from a state of desperation. He wondered how she had tolerated his own ignorance for so long.

  It was the first week of April. The fields were still barren and cold, but a haze of green had begun to appear on the shrubs that clustered near the farmhouses; the bare branches of the creek willows had turned a brilliant yellow. He knew that the loveliness of the farm would still be hidden, its yard a disaster of mud, its stunted apple trees bare, its garden empty. He regretted that he couldn't show it to Klara in the summertime. But when they finally arrived, when they disembarked at the familiar train station and saw the low whitewashed house with its dark thatched roof, the barn and the mill and the millpond where he and Matyas and Tibor used to sail wooden boats, he thought he had never seen any place more beautiful. Smoke rose from the stone chimney; from the barn came the steady whine of the electric saw. Stacks of fresh-cut lumber had been piled around the yard. In the orchard, the bare apple trees held their branches toward the April sky. He dropped his army duffel in the yard, and, taking Klara's hand, ran to the front door. He rapped on the windowpane and waited for his mother to come.

  A young blond woman opened the door. On her hip was a red-faced infant with a macerated zwieback in its hand. When the woman saw Andras and Mendel in their military coats, her eyebrows lifted in fear.

  "Jeno!" she cried. "Come quick!"

  A stocky man in overalls came running from the barn. "What's the matter?" he called. And when he'd reached them, "What's your business here?"

  Andras blinked. The sun had just come out from behind a cloud; it was difficult to focus on the man's features. "I'm Captain Levi," he said. "This is my parents' house."

  " Was their house," the man said, with an edge of pride. He narrowed his eyes at Andras. "You don't look like a military officer."

  "Squad Captain Levi of Company 112/30," Andras said, but the man wasn't looking at Andras anymore. He glanced at Mendel, whose coat was devoid of officers'

  bars. Then he turned his eyes upon Klara and raked her with a slow appreciative gaze.

  "And you don't look like a country girl," he said.

  Andras felt the blood rush to his face. "Where are my parents?" he said.

  "How should I know?" the man said. "You people wander here and there."

  "Don't be an ass, Jeno," the woman said, and then to Andras, "They're in Debrecen. They sold this place to us a month ago. Didn't they write you?"

  A month. It would have taken that long for a letter to reach Andras at the border.

  It was probably there now, moldering in the mail room, if they hadn't burned it for tinder.

  He tried to look past the woman and into the kitchen; the old kitchen table, the one whose every knot and groove he knew by heart, was still there. The baby turned its head to see what had interested Andras, then began to chew the zwieback again.

  "Listen," the woman said. "Don't you have family in Debrecen? Can't someone tell you where your parents are staying?"

  "I haven't been there in years," Andras said. "I don't know."

  "Well, I've got work to do," the man said. "I think you're finished talking to my wife."

  "And I think you're finished looking at mine," Andras said.

  But the man reached out at that moment and pinched Klara's waist, and Klara gasped. Without thinking, Andras put a fist into the man's gut. The man blew out a breath and stumbled back. His heel hit a rock and he fell backwards into the dense rich mud of the yard. When he tried to get to his feet, he slid forward and fell onto his hands. By that time Andras and Klara and Mendel were running toward the station, their bags flying behind them. Until that moment Andras had never appreciated the advantage of living so close to the train; now he did something he'd seen Matyas do countless times. He charged toward an open boxcar and swung his bag inside, and he gave Klara a leg up. Then he and Mendel jumped into the car, just as the train began to creak out of the station toward Debrecen. There was just enough time for them to witness the new owner of the lumberyard charging from the house with his shotgun in his hand, calling for his wife to find his goddamned shells.

  In the chill of that April afternoon they rode toward Debrecen in the open boxcar, trying to catch their breath. Andras was certain Klara would be horrified, but she was laughing. Her shoes and the hem of her dress were black with mud.

  "I'll never forget the look on his face," she said. "He didn't see it coming."

  "Neither did I," Andras said.

  "He deserved worse," Mendel said. "I would have liked to get a few licks in."

  "I wouldn't advise you to go back for another try," Klara said.

  Andras sat back against the wall of the boxcar and put an arm around her, and Mendel took a cigarette from the pocket of his overcoat and lay on his side, smoking and laughing to himself. The breeze was so thrilling, the noontime sun so bright, that Andras felt something like triumph. It wasn't until he looked at Klara again--her eyes serious now, as though to convey a private understanding of what had taken place in that mud-choked yard--that he realized he had just seen the last of his childhood home.

  It didn't take them long to find his parents' apartment in Debrecen. They stopped at a kosher bakery near the synagogue, and Andras learned from the baker that his mother had just been there to buy matzoh; Passover began on Friday.

  Passover. Last year the holiday had come and gone so quickly: a few Orthodox men had staged a seder in the bu
nkhouse, said the blessings just as if they'd had wine and greens and charoset and matzoh and bitter herbs before them, though all they had was potato soup. He vaguely remembered refusing the bread at dinner a few times, then becoming so weak that he had to start eating it again. He hadn't bothered to hope that he might be with his parents for Passover this year. But now he led Klara and Mendel down the avenue that led to Simonffy utca, where the baker had said his parents lived. There, in an ancient apartment building with two white goats in the courtyard and a still-leafless vine strung from balcony to balcony, they found his mother scrubbing the tiles of the second-floor veranda. A bucket of hot water steamed beside her; she wore a printed blue kerchief, and her arms were bright pink to the elbow. When she saw Andras and Klara and Mendel, she got to her feet and ran downstairs.

  His little mother. She crossed the courtyard in an instant, still nimble, and took Andras in her arms. Her quick dark eyes moved over him; she pressed him to her chest and held him there. After a long while she released him and embraced Klara, calling her kislanyom, my daughter. Finally she put her arms around Mendel, who tolerated this with a good-natured side glance at Andras; she knew Mendel from Andras's school days, and had always treated him as though he were another of her sons.

  "You poor boys," she said. "Look how they've used you."

  "We'll be all right, Anya. We've got a two-week furlough."

  "Two weeks!" She shook her head. "After a year and a half, two weeks. But at least you'll be here for Pesach."

  "And who's that garden slug living in our house in Konyar?"

  His mother put a hand to her mouth. "I hope you didn't quarrel with him."

  "Quarrel with him?" Andras said. "No! He was delightful. I kissed his hand.

  We're friends for life."

  "Oh,

  dear."

  "He chased us with a shotgun," Mendel said.

  "God, what a terrible man! It pains me to think of him living in that house."

  "I hope you got a good price for the place, at least," Andras said.

  "Your father arranged it all," his mother said, and sighed. "He said we were lucky to get what we did. We're comfortable here. There aren't so many chores. And I still have Kicsi and Noni." She nodded at the two little dairy goats who stood in their fenced enclosure in the yard.

  "You ought to have telephoned me," Klara said. "I would have come to help you move."

  His mother lowered her eyes. "We didn't want to disturb you. We knew you were busy with your students."

  "You're my family."

  "That's kind of you," Andras's mother said, but there was a note of reserve in her voice, almost a hint of deference. The next moment Andras wondered if he'd only imagined it, because his mother had taken Klara's arm and begun to lead her across the courtyard.

  The apartment was small and bright, a three-room corner unit with French doors leading out onto the veranda. His mother had planted winter kale in terra-cotta pots; she boiled some of it for their lunch and served it to them with potatoes and eggs and red peppers, and Andras and Mendel took their vitamin pills and ate a few apples Klara had brought for them, each in its own square of green paper. As they ate, his mother told them the news of Matyas and Tibor: Matyas was stationed near Abaszeplak, where his labor company was building a bridge over the Torysa River. But that wasn't all; before his conscription he'd created such a sensation at the Pineapple Club, dancing atop that piano in his white tie and tails, that the manager had offered him a two-year contract. In his letters he wrote that he was practicing, always practicing--working out steps in his mind while he and his mates built the Torysa Bridge, then keeping the poor fellows up at night while he danced the steps he'd worked out that day. By the time he got home, he said, he'd be tapping so fast they'd have to invent a new kind of music just to keep up with him.

  Tibor, Andras's mother told them, had joined a detachment of his labor-service battalion in Transylvania last November; his training in Modena had won him the job of company medic. His letters didn't carry much news about his work--Andras's mother suspected he didn't want to horrify her--but he always told her what he was reading. At the moment it was Miklos Radnoti, a young Jewish poet from Budapest who'd been conscripted into the labor service last fall. Like Andras, Radnoti had lived in Paris for a time. Some of his poems--one about sitting with a Japanese doctor on the terrace of the Rotonde, another about indolent afternoons in the Jardin du Luxembourg--put Tibor in mind of the time he'd spent there. It was rumored that Radnoti's battalion was serving not far from Tibor's own; the thought had helped Tibor endure the winter.

  To Andras it seemed a terrible and surreal luxury to sit in the kitchen of this clean sunny apartment while his mother delivered news of Matyas and Tibor and their time in the labor service. How could he relax into this familiar chair, how could he eat apples with Klara and Mendel and listen to the bleating of white goats in the courtyard, while his brothers built bridges and treated sick men in Ruthenia and Transylvania? It was terrible to feel this sweet drowsiness, terrible to find himself anticipating an afternoon nap in his own childhood bed, if indeed his childhood bed had been brought here from Konyar.

  Even the table before him--the small yellow one from the outdoor summer kitchen--gave him a pang of displaced longing, as though he'd become the conduit of his brothers'

  homesickness. This little table his father had built before Andras was born: He remembered sitting underneath it on a hot afternoon as his mother shelled peas for their dinner. He was eating a handful of peas as he watched an inchworm scale one of the table legs. He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with its tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now--that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive.

  "What are you thinking of?" his mother asked, and pressed his hand.

  "The summer kitchen."

  She laughed. "You recognized this table."

  "Of

  course."

  "Andras used to keep me company while I baked," his mother told Klara. "He used to draw in the dirt with a stick. I used to sweep the rest of the kitchen every day, but I would sweep around his drawings."

  There was a soft hoarse intake of breath from Mendel; he hadn't waited to find a comfortable place for a nap. He'd fallen asleep at the kitchen table, his head pillowed on his arms. Andras led Mendel to the sofa and covered him with a quilt. Mendel didn't wake, not through the walk across the room, nor through the arrangement of his limbs upon the sofa. It was a talent he had. Sometimes he'd sleep all the way through the morning march to the work site.

  "Will you sleep too?" Klara asked Andras. "I'll help your mother."

  But the bright sharp taste of the apples had woken him; now he didn't feel like sleeping. What he wanted, what he couldn't wait another moment to do, was to find his father.

  It was a piece of raw Hungarian irony that his father was employed in the milling of timber--some of it, perhaps, the very same timber that Andras had cut in the forests of Transylvania and Subcarpathia. Debrecen Consolidated Lumber bore no resemblance to the lumberyard Lucky Bela had sold to the hateful young man in Konyar. This was a large-scale government-funded operation that processed hundreds of trees daily, and turned out thousands of cords of lumber for use in the building of army barracks and storage facilities and railroad stations. For months now Hungary had been girding itself for war, anticipating that it might be forced to enter the conflict alongside Germany. If that were to happen, vast quantities of timber would be needed to support the army's advance. Of course, if he'd had a choice, Lucky Bela would have preferred to work for a smaller company whose products were to be sold for peaceful purposes. But he knew how fortunate he was to have a job at all when so many Jews were out of work. And if Hungary went to war, even the smaller lumber companies would be drafted into government service.
So he'd taken the job of second assistant foreman when the previous second assistant foreman had died of pneumonia that past winter. The first assistant foreman, a school friend of Bela's, had offered him the job as a temporary measure, a way to see Bela through the lean winter months. For two months Bela had lived in Debrecen and gone home on weekends, leaving the care of his own mill to his foreman. When the school friend had offered the job on a permanent basis, Bela and Flora had decided that the time had come to sell their tiny operation. They were getting older. The chores had become more difficult, their debt deeper. With the money from the sale, they could pay their creditors and rent a small apartment in Debrecen.

  It was their bad luck that the only interested buyer had been a member of Hungary's National Socialist Party, the Arrow Cross, and that the man's offer was half of what the lumberyard was worth. Bela had no choice but to sell. It had been a hard winter.

  They'd had barely enough to eat, and for an entire month the trains had failed to come to Konyar. There had been a track failure that no one seemed inclined to fix. Certain normal processes--the delivery of mail, the restocking of provisions, the hauling away of milled lumber--had shut down altogether. But in Debrecen there was no food shortage, no slowdown at the mill. He would be paid twice what he could pay himself at his own lumberyard. It was a terrible shame to have had to sell at such a price, but the move had already done them good--Flora had regained the weight she had lost during that long starved winter, and Bela's cough and rheumatism had abated. His voice and gait were strong as he walked through the lumberyard with Andras, telling the story.