The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  "Is that all, then?" Jozsef said, finally. "That's what you've got for me?"

  "Here's the truth," Andras said. "I don't have much heart to give you a pep talk."

  "I don't want a pep talk," Jozsef whispered. "I want to know how to survive.

  You've been doing this for almost three years. Don't you have any advice?"

  "Well, don't publish a subversive newspaper, for one thing," Andras said. "You might find your commanding officer pointing a gun at you across his desk."

  "Is that what happened?" Jozsef said. "What did he want?"

  "Our printing plates and originals. He threatened to search our houses if we didn't produce them."

  "Oh, God. What did you tell him?"

  "The truth. The originals are in our editor's office at the Jewish News. Or were.

  Varsadi's got them by now, I'm sure."

  Jozsef let out a long breath. "That'll have been a bad day at work for your editor."

  "I know. I've been sick about it. But what were we going to do? We couldn't send Varsadi's men to Nefelejcs utca."

  "All right," Jozsef whispered. "I'll be certain not to publish a subversive newspaper. What else?"

  Andras told Jozsef what he knew: Keep quiet. Become invisible. Don't make enemies of the other work servicemen. Don't talk back to the guards. Eat what they give you, no matter how bad it is, and always save something for later. Keep as clean as you can. Keep your feet dry. Take care of your clothes so they don't fall apart. Know which guards are sympathetic. Follow all the rules you can stand to follow; when you break the rules, don't get caught. Don't let yourself forget the life back home. Don't forget that your term of service is finite.

  He went silent, remembering the other list he and Mendel had made long ago, the ten commandments of the Munkaszolgalat. Had it only been three years since he'd been sent to Carpatho-Ruthenia? By whose reckoning could the term of service be called finite? Suddenly he couldn't stand to think or talk about it a moment longer. "I've got to get to sleep," he said.

  "All right," Jozsef said. "Listen, though. Thanks."

  "Shut up, you idiots," Mendel whispered from the neighboring bunk.

  "You're welcome," Andras said. "Now go to sleep."

  Andras climbed up into his own bunk and wrapped himself in his blanket. Jozsef didn't make another sound; his tossing and shifting had stilled. But Andras lay awake and listened to the other men's breathing. He remembered quiet nights like this from the beginning of his first conscription. Before long there would be no easy sleep for any of them; someone would always be coughing or groaning or running for the latrine, and there would be the torment of lice, and the dull nauseating pain of hunger. Midnight lineups, too, if Kozma was inclined. The Munkaszolgalat was like a chronic disease, he thought--its symptoms abated at times, but always returned. When he'd begun his service in Transylvania he'd felt precisely what Jozsef was feeling now, the deep injustice of it all. This couldn't possibly be happening to him, not to him and Klara, not to his mind, not to his body, that sturdy and faithful machine. He couldn't believe that all the great urgencies of his time in Paris--everything that had seemed important, all his studies, every project, every moment with Klara, every secret, every worry about money or school or work or food--had been boxed away, stripped of context, made nonsensical, made small, consigned to impossibility, crammed into a space too narrow to admit life.

  But today as he'd marched to work and shoveled dirt and eaten the miserable food and slogged home through the mud, he hadn't felt indignant; he'd hardly felt anything at all.

  He was just an animal on the earth, one of billions. The fact that he'd had a happy childhood in Konyar, had gone to school, learned to draw, gone to Paris, fallen in love, studied, worked, had a son--none of it was predictive of what might happen in the future; it was largely a matter of luck. None of it was a reward, no more than the Munkaszolgalat was a punishment; none of it entitled him to future happiness or comfort. Men and women suffered all over the world. Hundreds of thousands had already died in this war, and he himself might die here in Turka. He suspected the chances were heavily in favor of it. The things he could control were few and small; he was a particle of life, a speck of human dust, lost on the eastern edge of Europe. He knew there would come a time, perhaps not far off, when he would find it hard to follow the rules he'd just set out for Jozsef.

  He had to think of Klara, he told himself. He had to think of Tamas. And his parents, and Tibor, and Matyas. He had to pretend it wasn't hopeless; he had to allow himself to be fooled into staying alive. He had to make himself a willing party to the insidious trick of love.

  At the end of Andras's second week in Turka, the road surveyor's assistant was killed by a land mine. It happened at the cusp of the new road, a few kilometers from Andras's work site, but word traveled quickly through the line of work teams. The surveyor's assistant had been one of them, a labor serviceman. He'd been helping the surveyor map the road through a Soviet minefield. The field was supposed to have been cleared months earlier by another labor company, but that group must have been anxious to call the job finished. The assistant had tripped the mine as he'd been setting up the tripod. The explosion had killed him instantly.

  The surveyor was a work serviceman too, an engineer from Szeged. Andras had seen him pass by on his way to the surveying site. He was short and pallid, with rimless spectacles and a brushy gray moustache; his uniform jacket was just as threadbare as anyone else's, his boots wrapped with rags to keep them from falling apart. But because his function was so important to the army, he had an official-looking hat and an insignia on the pocket of his overcoat. He was allowed to buy things in town and to smoke cigarettes. And he was always being called upon to interpret for someone: He knew Polish, Russian, even some Ukrainian, and could speak to any Galician peasant in his native tongue. His assistant, a slim dark-eyed boy who couldn't have been more than twenty, had been a silent shadow at his heels. After the boy died, the surveyor tore his sleeve in mourning and rubbed his face with ashes. He dragged his equipment to and from the surveying site with an expression of abstracted despair. The boy had been like a son to him, everyone said; in fact, Andras learned later, he had been the son of the surveyor's closest friend in Szeged.

  As August rolled forward, it became clear that the surveyor would have to choose a new assistant soon. He was too old to drag the equipment around by himself; someone would have to help him if the road were to be marked out to Skhidnytsya by the time the German inspectors arrived in November. The surveyor began asking around as he made his way past the groups of work servicemen: Did anyone know mathematics? Had anyone studied engineering? Was there a draftsman among them, an architect? At the noon meal they saw him studying lists of the work servicemen's names and former occupations, looking for someone who could be of use.

  One morning, as Andras and Mendel and the rest of their group worked to clear a mass of broken asphalt, the surveyor came shuffling up the road behind Major Kozma.

  When they reached Andras's group, the major stopped and cocked a thumb at Andras.

  "That's the one," he said. "Levi, Andras. He doesn't look like much, but apparently he's had some training."

  The surveyor scrutinized his list. "You were a student of architecture," he said.

  Andras shrugged. It hardly seemed true anymore.

  "How long did you study?"

  "Two years. One course in engineering."

  "Well," the surveyor said, and sighed. "That'll do."

  Mendel, who had been listening, moved closer to Andras now; he fixed his eyes on the surveyor and said, "He doesn't want the job."

  In an instant, Major Kozma's hand had moved to the riding crop tucked into his belt. He turned to Mendel and squinted his good eye. "Did anyone speak to you, cockroach?"

  For a moment Mendel hesitated, but then he continued as though the major were not to be feared. "The job is dangerous, sir. Levi is a husband and a father. Take someone who's got less to lose."

  T
he major's scar flushed red. He pulled the crop from his belt and struck Mendel across the face. "Don't tell me how to manage my company, cockroach," he said. And then to Andras: "Present your work papers, Levi."

  Andras did as he was told.

  Kozma withdrew a grease pencil from his uniform pocket and made a notation on the papers, indicating that Andras was now under the surveyor's immediate command.

  While he wrote, Andras extracted a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to Mendel, whose cheek showed a line of blood; Mendel pressed the handkerchief to his cheek. The surveyor watched them, seeming to understand the relationship between them.

  He cleared his throat and signaled to Kozma.

  "Just a thought," the surveyor said. "If you please, Major."

  "What is it now?"

  "Why don't you give me that one, too?" He cocked a thumb at Mendel. "He's tall and strong. He can carry the equipment. And if there's dangerous work to be done, I can make him do it. I wouldn't want to lose another good assistant."

  Kozma pursed his ruined lips. "You want both of them?"

  "It's an idea, sir."

  "You're a greedy little Jew, Szolomon."

  "The road has to be mapped. It'll go faster with two of them."

  By that time, another officer had made his way over to their work group. This man was the general work foreman, a reserve colonel from the Royal Hungarian Corps of Engineers. He wanted to know the reason for the delay.

  "Szolomon wants these two men to assist with the surveying."

  "Well, sign them up and send them off. We can't have men standing around."

  And so Andras and Mendel became the surveyor's new assistants, heirs to the position of the boy who had been killed.

  By day they mapped the course of the road between Turka and Yavora, between Yavora and Novyi Kropyvnyk, between Novyi Kropyvnyk and Skhidnytsya. They learned the mysteries of the surveyor's glass, the theodolite; the surveyor taught them how to mount it on the tripod and how to calibrate it with plumb and spirit level. He taught them how to orient it toward true north and how to line up the sight axis and the horizontal axis. He taught them to think of the landscape in the language of geometric forms: planes bisected by other planes lying at oblique or acute angles, all of it comprehensible, quantifiable, sane. The jagged hills were nothing more than complex polyhedrons, the Stryj a twisting half cylinder extending from the border of Lvivska Province to the deeper, longer trench of the Dniester. But they found it impossible to see only the geometry of the land; evidence of the war lay in plain view everywhere, demanding to be acknowledged. Farms had been burned, some of them by the Germans in their advance, others by the Russians in retreat. Untended crops had rotted in the fields.

  In the towns, Jewish businesses had been vandalized and looted and now stood empty.

  There was not a Jewish man or woman or child to be seen. The Poles were gone too. The Ukrainians who remained were opaque-eyed, as if the horrors they'd witnessed had led them to curtain their souls. Though the summer grasses still grew tall, and tart blackberries had come out on the shrubs along the roadside, the country itself seemed dead, an animal killed and gutted on the forest floor. Now the Germans were trying to stuff it full of new organs and make it crawl forward again. A new heart, new blood, a new liver, new entrails--and a new nerve center, Hitler's headquarters at Vinnitsa. The road itself was a vein. Soldiers, forced laborers, ammunition, and supplies would run through it toward the front.

  The surveyor was a clever man, and knew that his theodolite might be useful beyond its role in mapping the road. He had realized, not long into his sojourn in Ukraine, that it might work as a powerful tool of persuasion. When they came upon a prosperous-looking farmhouse or inn, he would set up the theodolite within view of the owners; someone would come out of the farmhouse or inn to ask what the surveyor was doing, and he would tell them that the road was to pass through their land, and possibly through their very house. Bargaining would follow: Could the surveyor be persuaded to move the road just a little to the east, just a little farther off? The surveyor could, for a modest price. In that manner he collected bread and cheese, fresh eggs, late summer fruit, old overcoats, blankets, candles. Andras and Mendel brought food and supplies home to the orphanage nearly every night and distributed them among the men.

  The surveyor also had valuable connections, among them a friend at the Royal Hungarian Officers' Training School in Turka--an officer there who had once been a well-known actor back in Szeged. This man, Pal Erdo, had been charged with staging a production of Karoly Kisfaludy's famous martial drama, The Tatars in Hungary. When he and the surveyor met in town, Erdo complained of the difficulty and the absurdity of producing a play in the midst of preparing young men to go to war. The surveyor began lobbying him to use the play as an excuse to do some good--to request, for example, the help of the labor servicemen, who might benefit from spending a few of their evening hours in the relative calm and safety of the school's assembly hall. In particular he mentioned Andras's background in set design and Mendel's literary ability. Captain Erdo, an old-guard liberal, was eager to do what he could to ease the labor servicemen's situation; in addition to Andras and Mendel he requested the aid of six others from the 79/6th, among them Jozsef Hasz, with his talent for painting, as well as a tailor, a carpenter, and an electrician. Three evenings a week this group marched directly from the work site to the officers' training school, where they assisted in the staging of a smaller military drama within the larger one. For payment they received an extra measure of soup from the kitchen of the officers' training school.

  On the days when the surveyor didn't need them--days when he had to sit in an office and make calculations, correct topographical maps, and write his reports--Andras and Mendel worked with the others on the road. Those days, Kozma made them pay for their time with the surveyor and their evenings at the officers' training school. Without fail he gave them the hardest work. If the work required tools, he took the tools away and made them do it with their rag-wrapped hands. When their work group had to transport wooden pilings to shore up the embankments on either side of the road, he made a guard sit in the middle of Andras's and Mendel's pilings while they carried them. When they had to cart barrowfuls of sand, he removed the wheels from their wheelbarrows and made them drag the carts through the mud. They paid the price without a word. They knew that their position with the surveyor and their work at the officers' training school might keep them alive once the cold weather set in.

  There was no discussion between Andras and Mendel of writing a newspaper for the 79/6th, of course; even if they'd had the time, there was no way to convince themselves that it would be safe. Only once did the subject of The Crooked Rail come up again between them. It was on a rainy Tuesday in early September, when they were out with the surveyor at the far end of the road, mapping a course toward a bridge that had to be rebuilt. Szolomon had left them in an abandoned dairy barn while he went to speak to a farmer whose pigsties were situated too close to the roadbed-to-be. Outside the barn, a steady drizzle fell. Inside, Andras and Mendel sat on overturned milk pails and ate the brown bread and soft-curd cheese the surveyor had gleaned for them that morning.

  "Not bad for a Munkaszolgalat lunch," Mendel said.

  "We've

  had

  worse."

  "It's no milk and honey, though." Mendel's usual wry expression had fallen away.

  "I think about it every day," he said. "You might have been in Palestine by now. Instead, thanks to me, we're touring beautiful rural Ukraine." Their old joke from The Snow Goose.

  "Thanks to you?" Andras said. "That's ridiculous, you know."

  "Not really," Mendel said, his moth-antenna eyebrows drawing close together.

  "The Snow Goose was my doing. So was The Biting Fly. The Crooked Rail came naturally, of course. I was the one who wrote the first piece. And I was the one who suggested we use the paper to get the men angry and make them slow down the operation."
<
br />   "What does that have to do with it?"

  "I keep thinking about it, Andras. Maybe Varsadi's operation fell under suspicion because we were making the trains run late. Maybe we slowed things down just enough to raise a red flag."

  "If the trains ran late, it's because the men in charge of the operation were too greedy to send them out on time. You can't take the blame for that."

  "You can't ignore the connection," Mendel said.

  "It's not your fault we're here. There's a war on, in case you haven't heard."

  "I can't help thinking we might have pushed things over the edge. It's been keeping me up at night, to tell you the truth. I can't help but feel like we're the ones to blame."

  The same thought had occurred to him, on the train and many times since. But when he heard Mendel speak the words aloud, they seemed to reflect a novel kind of desperation, a brand of desire Andras had never considered before. Here was Mendel Horovitz insisting, even at the price of terrible burning guilt, that he'd had some control over his own fate and Andras's, some agency in the events that had swept them up and deposited them on the Eastern Front. Of course, Andras thought. Of course. Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?