The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  And then the foreman was at Andras's side, shouting his orders. The coal had to be shoveled, the carts had to be moved, because somewhere to the east a war had to be fought.

  The most stunning news of Andras's life reached him on a still, hot evening in July, a month after Hungary had entered the war, in the dead hour between work and dinner, on the front steps of Barracks 21. He and two of his barracks-mates, a pair of lanky red-haired twins from Sopron, had gone to the office after work to get their letters and parcels. The men were blistered with sunburn, their eyes dazed from the brightness of the day; their sweat had turned the dust into a fine paste, which had dried into a thin crackling film on their skin. As ever, there was an interminable line at the post office.

  The mail was subject to inspection by the postmaster and his staff, which meant that every parcel had to be opened, inspected, and robbed of any food or cigarettes or money it might contain before its recipient could take away what was left. The Sopron twins chuckled over a recent copy of The Biting Fly as they waited. Andras's mind was muffled with heat; he could scarcely remember illustrating that issue. He uncorked his canteen and drank the last few drops of water. If they had to wait in this line much longer, there wouldn't be time to wash before dinner. Had he asked Klara to send him shaving soap?

  He envisioned a clean cake of it, wrapped in waxy white paper and printed with the image of a girl in an old-fashioned bathing costume. Or perhaps there would be something else, something less necessary but just as good: a box of violet pastilles, say, or a new photograph of Klara.

  When they reached the window at last, the mail clerk put two identical packages into the twins' hands. Each had been opened and inspected as usual, and the wrappers of four chocolate bars lay nested inside the packages like a taunt. But there must have been a surplus of baked goods in the mail that day: the parcels still contained identical tins of cinnamon rugelach. Miku and Samu were generous boys, and they admired Andras for his role in the creation of The Biting Fly; they waited for him while he retrieved a single thin envelope from Klara, and on the way back to the barracks they shared their bounty with him. Despite the comforts of cinnamon and sugar, Andras couldn't help but feel disappointed with his own lean envelope. He was out of shaving soap and vitamins and a hundred other things. His wife might have thought about his needs. She might have sent him even a small package. While the twins went inside with their own parcels, he sat down on the steps and tore open the letter with his pocketknife.

  From across the quadrangle, Mendel Horovitz saw Andras sitting on the barracks steps with a letter in his hands. He hurried across the yard, hoping to catch his friend before he went to the sinks to wash for dinner. Mendel had just come from the supply office, where the clerk had allowed him to use the typewriter; in a mere forty-five minutes he'd managed to type all six pages of the new Biting Fly. He thought there might still be time for Andras to begin the illustrations that evening. He whistled a tune from Tin Pan Alley, the movie he'd seen while in Budapest on furlough. But when he reached the barracks steps he stopped and fell silent. Andras had raised his eyes to Mendel, the letter trembling in his hand.

  "What is it, Parisi?" Mendel said.

  Andras couldn't speak; he thought he might never speak again. Perhaps he had failed to understand. But he looked at the letter again, and there were the words in Klara's neat slanted script.

  She was pregnant. He, Andras Levi, was going to be a father.

  What did it matter now how many tons of coal he had to shovel? Who cared how many times the cart tipped from its unstable rails, how many times his blisters broke and bled, how brutally the guards abused him? What did it matter how hungry or thirsty he was, or how little sleep he got, or how long he had to stand in the quadrangle for lineup?

  What did he care for his own body? Fifty miles away in Budapest, Klara was pregnant with his child. All that mattered was that he survive the months between now and the date she'd projected in her letter--the twenty-ninth of December. By then he would have fulfilled his two years of military service. The war might even be finished, depending upon the outcome of Hitler's campaign in Russia. Who knew what life might be like for Jews in Hungary then, but if Horthy was still regent it might not be an impossible place to live. Or maybe they would emigrate to America, to the dirty and glamorous city of New York. The day he got Klara's letter he drew a calendar on the back of a copy of The Biting Fly. At the end of each workday he crossed off a square, and gradually the days began to queue up into a long succession of Xs. Letters flew between Budapest and Banhida: Klara was still teaching private students, would continue to teach as long as she could demonstrate the steps. She was putting money away so they might rent a larger apartment when Andras came home. A friend of her mother's owned a building on Nefelejcs utca; the neighborhood wasn't fashionable, but the building was close to the house on Benczur utca and only a few blocks from the city park. Nefelejcs was the name of the tiny blue flower that grew in the woods, the one with the infinitesimal yellow ring at its center: forget-me-not. He couldn't, of course, not for a moment; his life seemed balanced on the edge of an unimaginable change.

  In September a miracle occurred: Andras received a three-day furlough. There was no particular reason for that piece of luck, as far as he could determine; at Banhida it seemed furloughs were granted at random except in the case of a death in the family. He learned of the furlough on a Thursday, received his papers on Friday, boarded a train to Budapest on Saturday morning. It was a luminous day, the air soft with the last radiant warmth of summer. The sky overhead burned a clear pale blue, and as they moved away from Banhida the smell of sulfur faded into the sweet green smell of cut grass. Along the dirt roads that ran beside the tracks, farmers drove wagons heavy with hay and corn. The markets in Budapest would be full of squashes and apples and red cabbages, bell peppers and pears, late grapes, potatoes. It was astonishing to remember that such things still existed in the world--that they'd existed all along while he'd survived on a daily diet of coffee and thin soup and a couple hundred grams of sandy bread.

  Klara was waiting for him at Keleti Station. He had never seen a woman so beautiful in all his life: She wore a dress of rose-colored jersey that grazed the swell of her belly, and a neat close-fitting hat of cinnamon wool. In continued defiance of the prevailing fashion, her hair was uncut and uncurled; she had looped it into a low chignon at the base of her neck. He folded her into his arms, breathing in the dusky smell of her skin. He was afraid to crush her against him as fiercely as he wanted to. He held her at arm's length and looked at her.

  "Is it true?" he said.

  "As you can see."

  "But is it really?"

  "I suppose we'll find out in a few months." She took his arm and led him from the station toward the Varosliget. He could hardly believe it was possible to stroll through the September afternoon with Klara at his side, his work tools far away in Banhida, nothing ahead of him but the prospect of pleasure and rest. Then, as they turned at Istvan ut and it became apparent that they were heading for her family's house, he braced himself for the necessity of an interaction with her brother and sister-in-law and possibly even with Jozsef, who had rented an atelier in Buda so he could paint again. The absence of Andras's officer's insignia would have to be explained, his gauntness remarked over and regretted, and all that time he would have to look into the complacent and well-fed countenances of Klara's relatives and feel the painful difference between their situation and his own. But when they reached the corner of Istvan and Nefelejcs, Klara paused at the door of a gray stone building and took a key ring from her pocket. She held up an ornate key for Andras to admire. Then she fitted the key into the lock of the entry door, and the door swung inward to admit them.

  "Where are we?" Andras asked.

  "You'll

  see."

  The courtyard was filled with courtyard things: bicycles and potted ferns and rows of tomato plants in wooden boxes. At the center there was a mossy fountain with lily pads
and goldfish; a dark-haired girl sat at its edge, trailing her hand in the water. She looked up at Andras and Klara with serious eyes, then dried her hand on her skirt and ran to one of the ground-floor apartments. Klara led Andras to an open stairway with a vine-patterned railing, and they climbed three flights of shallow stairs. With a different key she opened a set of double doors and let him into an apartment overlooking the street. The place smelled of roasted chicken and fried potatoes. There were four brass coat hooks beside the door; an old homburg hat of Andras's hung on one of them, and Klara's gray coat on the other.

  "This can't be our apartment," Andras said.

  "Who

  else's?"

  "Impossible. It's too fine."

  "You haven't even seen it yet. Don't judge it so quickly. You might find it not at all to your taste."

  But of course it was exactly to his taste. She knew perfectly well what he liked.

  There was a red-tiled kitchen, a bedroom for Andras and Klara, a tiny second bedroom that might be used as a nursery, a private bath with its own enameled tub. The sitting room was lined with bookshelves, which Klara had begun to fill with new books on ballet and music and architecture. There was a wooden drafting table in one corner, a distant Hungarian cousin of the one Klara had given Andras in Paris. A phonograph stood on a thin-legged taboret in another corner. At the far end of the room, a low sofa faced an inlaid wooden table. Two ivory-striped armchairs flanked the high windows with their view of the neo-Baroque apartment building across the street.

  "It's a home," he said. "You made us a home." And he took her into his arms.

  What he wanted most during the short span of his furlough, he told Klara, was to be at liberty to see to his pregnant wife's needs. She resisted at first, pointing out that he had no one to care for him at Banhida. But he argued that to care for her would be a far greater luxury than to be cared for himself. And so, that first night home, after they'd eaten the roasted chicken and potatoes, she allowed him to make her coffee and read to her from the newspaper, and then to run a bath for her and bathe her with the large yellow sponge. Her pregnant body was a miraculous thing to him. A pink bloom had come out beneath the surface of her pale skin, and her hair seemed thicker and more lustrous. He washed it himself and pulled it forward to drape over her breasts. Her areolae had grown larger and darker, and a faint tawny line had emerged between her navel and her pubic triangle, transected by the silvery scar of her earlier pregnancy. Her bones no longer showed so starkly beneath the skin. Most notably, a complicated inward look had appeared in her eyes--such a deep commingling of sadness and expectancy that it was almost a relief when she closed them. As she lay back in the bathtub, cooling her arms against the enamel, he was struck by the fact that at Banhida his life had been reduced to the simplest needs and emotions: the hope for a piece of carrot in his soup, the fear of the foreman's anger, the desire for another fifteen minutes of sleep. For Klara, who had lived in greater security here in Budapest, there remained the opportunity for more complicated reflection. It was happening as he watched, as he bathed her with the yellow sponge.

  "Tell me what you're thinking," he said. "I can't guess."

  She opened her gray eyes and turned to him. "How strange it is," she said. "To be pregnant while we're at war. If Hitler controls all of Europe, and perhaps Russia, too, who knows what may happen to this child? There's no use pretending Horthy can keep us from harm."

  "Do you think we should try to emigrate?"

  She sighed. "I've thought about it. I've even written to Elisabet. But the situation is as I expected. It's almost impossible to get an entry visa now. Even if we could, I'm not certain I'd want to. Our families are here. I can't imagine leaving my mother again, particularly now. And it's hard to imagine starting another life in a strange country."

  "The travel, too," he said, stroking her wet shoulders. "It's hardly safe to cross an ocean during a war."

  Encircling her knees with her arms, she said, "It's not just the war I've been thinking about. I've had all kinds of doubts."

  "What

  doubts?"

  "About what sort of mother I'll be to this child. About the hundred thousand ways I failed Elisabet."

  "You didn't fail Elisabet. She turned out a strong and beautiful woman. And your situation was different then. You were alone, and you were just a child yourself."

  "And now I'm practically an old woman."

  "That's nonsense, Klara."

  "Not really." She frowned at her knees. "I'm thirty-four, you know. The birth was a near disaster last time. The obstetrician says my womb may have been damaged. My mother came to my last appointment, and I wish now that she hadn't. She's been driving herself mad with worry."

  "Why, Klara? Is there a danger to the baby?" He took her chin and made her raise her eyes to him. "Are you in danger yourself?"

  "Women give birth every day," she said, and tried to smile.

  "What did the doctor say?"

  "He says there's a risk of complication. He wants me to have the child at the hospital."

  "Of course you'll have it at the hospital," Andras said. "I don't care what it costs.

  We'll find a way to pay."

  "My brother will help," she said.

  "I'll get work," Andras said. "We'll make the money somehow."

  "Gyorgy wouldn't begrudge us anything," Klara said. "No more than your own brothers would."

  Andras didn't want to argue, not during the brief time they had together. "I know he'd help if we needed it," he said. "Let's hope we don't have to ask him."

  "My mother wants me to move home to Benczur utca," Klara said, twisting her wet hair into a rope. "She doesn't understand why I insist that you and I must have our own apartment. She thinks it's a needless expense. And she doesn't like me to be alone.

  What if something were to happen? she says. As if I hadn't spent all those years alone in Paris."

  "She wants to protect you all the more, because of that," he said. "It must have tortured her not to be with you when you were pregnant with Elisabet."

  "I understand, of course. But I'm not a child of fifteen anymore."

  "Perhaps she's right, though. If there's a danger, wouldn't it be better for you to be at home?"

  "Not you, too, Andraska!"

  "I hate to think of you being alone."

  "I'm not alone. Ilana is here with me almost every day. And I can walk to my mother's house in six minutes. But I can't live there again, and not just because I'm accustomed to being on my own. What if the authorities were to discover who I am? If I were living in my family's house, they'd be directly implicated."

  "Ah, Klara! How I wish you didn't have to think about any of this."

  "And how I wish you didn't either," she said. And then she stood from the bath, and the water fell from her skin in a glittering curtain, and he followed the new curves of her body with his hands.

  Later that night, when he found he couldn't sleep, he got out of bed and went into the sitting room, to the drafting table Klara had bought for him; he ran his hands over that smooth hard surface devoid of paper or tools. There was a time when he might have comforted himself with work, even if it were just a project he had set himself; the pure concentration required to draw a series of fine unbroken black lines could turn his mind aside, even if just for a few moments, from the gravest of problems. But the fact was that he'd never before had to worry about the fate of his pregnant wife and his unborn child and the entire Western world. In any case, there was no project he could imagine taking up now; when it came to the study and practice of architecture, his mind was as blank and planless as the drafting table before him. The work he'd done those past two years when he wasn't cutting trees or building roads or shoveling coal--scratching in notebooks, doodling in the margins of Mendel's newspapers--might have kept his hands from lying idle; it might even have kept him from going mad. But it had also been a distraction from the fact that his life as a student of architecture was slipping farther a
nd farther away, his hands losing their memory of how to make a perfect line, his mind losing its ability to solve problems of form and function. How far away he felt now from that atelier at the Ecole Speciale where he and Polaner had suspended a running track from the roof of a sports club. How astounding that such an idea had occurred to them. It seemed an eternity since he'd looked at a building with any thought in his mind beside the hope that its roof wouldn't leak and that it would keep out the wind. He'd hardly even taken note of what the facade of this building looked like.

  He wished he could talk to Tibor. He would know what Andras should do, how he might protect Klara and begin to reclaim his life. But Tibor was three hundred kilometers away in the Carpathians. Andras couldn't imagine when they might next sit down together to make sense of who they were now, or at least to take some comfort in their shared uncertainty.