The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  "I'll go away if you want."

  Novak shook his head again, and Andras waited for him to say something more.

  But he had exhausted himself with speaking; he fell into a shallow open-mouthed sleep.

  Andras sat with him as he struggled for breath. Outside, the wind was shrill with the force of the blizzard. Andras put his head on his arm and fell asleep, and when he woke it had grown dark inside the granary. No one had a candle; those who still had flashlights hadn't had batteries for months. The sound and smell of sick men closed in around him like a close-woven veil. Novak was wide awake now and looking intently at him, his breathing more labored than before. Each intake of breath sounded as though he were building a complicated structure from inappropriate materials with broken tools; each exhalation was the defeated collapse of that ugly and imbalanced structure. He spoke again, so quietly that Andras had to lean close to hear.

  "It's all right now," he was saying. "Everything's all right."

  It was unclear whether he meant to reassure Andras or himself or both of them at once; he seemed almost to be addressing someone who wasn't present, though his eyes were fixed on Andras in the darkness. Soon he went quiet and fell asleep again. Andras stayed beside him all night as he wandered in and out of sleep, and the next day he gave Novak his ration of bread. Novak couldn't eat it dry, but Andras mashed it into crumbs and mixed it with melted snow. They spent three days that way, Novak drifting awake and sleeping, Andras giving him small measures of food and water, until the weather had cleared and the snow had melted enough for the 79/6th to go on again toward the border.

  When Balint announced that the men would move out the following morning, Andras's relief was cut with dismay. He begged a moment's conference with the major; they couldn't leave the other men there to die.

  "How do you propose to move them, Serviceman?" Balint asked, his tone stern, though not unkind. "We don't have ambulances. We don't have materials for litters. And we can't possibly stay here."

  "We can improvise something, sir."

  Balint shook his shaggy head. "These men are better off inside. The medical corps will be along in a few days. Those who can be moved will be moved then."

  "Some of them will be dead by then," Andras said.

  "In that case, Levi, dragging them into the cold and snow won't save them."

  "One of those men saved my life when I was a student in Paris. I can't abandon him."

  "Listen to me," Balint said, his large earth-colored eyes steady on Andras's. "I have a son and daughter at home. The others are husbands and fathers, too, many of them. We're young men. We've got to get home alive. That's the principle by which I've commanded this company since we turned back. We're still a hundred kilometers from the border, five days' walk at least. If we carry sick men with us we'll slow the entire company. We could lose our lives."

  "Let me stay, then, sir."

  "That's not in my orders."

  "Let

  me."

  "No!" Balint said, angry now. "I'll march you out at gunpoint if I have to."

  But in the end there was no need for a show of force. Zoltan Novak, former husband and father, former director of the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt and the Budapest Operahaz, 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  An Escape

  BY THE TIME his train reached Budapest, the forsythia had come into bloom.

  All else was gray or vaguely yellow-green; a few of the trees along the outer ring road showed the swelling of buds, though the city retained the wet rawness of recent snowmelt. 1943 still felt unreal to him. He had lost his sense of time entirely through the last phase of the journey home. But he knew today's date: It was the twenty-fifth of March, seven months and three weeks since he'd been sent to Ukraine. Klara had come to meet his train at Keleti Station. He'd nearly gone faint at the sight of her on the platform with a child standing beside her--standing! His son, Tamas, in a knee-length coat and sturdy little boy's shoes. Tamas, almost a year and a half old now; Tamas who had been a baby in Klara's arms the last time Andras had seen him. Klara's brow showed a narrow pleat of worry, but she was otherwise unchanged; her dark hair was caught in its loose knot at her nape, the beloved planes of her clavicles exposed by the neckline of her gray dress. She made no attempt to hide her dismay at Andras's physical state. She put a hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled. He knew what he looked like, knew he looked like a man who'd been threshed almost free of his body. His head had been shaved for delousing; his clothes, or what was left of them, hung loosely on his frame. His hands were crabbed and bent, his cheek scarred with three white rays where the glass from a shot-out barn window had cut him. When Klara took him into her arms he felt how careful she was with him, as though she might hurt him with an embrace. Jozsef was not there to witness their reunion; he was still in Debrecen, recovering at a military hospital.

  His knee had been wounded during the border crossing, and he was receiving treatment for an infection of the soft tissues. He would return in another week or two. From a post office near the hospital, Andras had been able to wire Klara the news of his own return.

  Darling. Darling. They would have stood there saying it to each other all night, looking at each other and kissing each other's hands, touching each other's faces, had not Tamas made his protest and begged to be picked up. Andras held him and looked into the round face with its inquisitive eyebrows and its large expressive eyes.

  "Apa," Klara instructed the boy, and pointed to Andras's chest. But Tamas turned and put his arms out to Klara, afraid of this unfamiliar man.

  Andras bent to his knapsack and opened the flap. Inside he found the red India-rubber ball he'd bought for three filler from a street vendor in Debrecen. The ball had a white star at each of its poles and was bisected by a band of green paint. Tamas put out his hands for it. But Andras tossed it high into the air and caught it on his back, between his shoulder blades. He'd learned the trick from one of his schoolmates in Konyar. Now he plucked the ball from his back and bowed to Tamas, who opened his mouth and crowed with laughter.

  "More," Tamas said.

  It was the first word Andras had heard him speak. The trick proved equally funny a second and third time. At last Andras gave Tamas the ball, and he held it raptly as Klara carried him through the Erzsebetvaros toward home. Andras walked beside them with his hand at Klara's waist. No longer with him was the feeling he'd had when he'd returned home from the Munkaszolgalat before: that the continuation of ordinary life in Budapest was impossible after what he'd come from, that his mental and physical torment must necessarily have changed the rest of the world. There was a certain numbness where he had once experienced incredulity. It almost frightened him, that stillness. It was inarguable evidence of his having grown older.

  As they walked, Klara told him the news of the family: how the money from the sale of Jozsef's paintings had allowed Gyorgy to regain his health in the hospital; how Klara's mother, who'd had pneumonia over the winter, was now hale enough to go to the market every morning for the day's vegetables and bread; how Ilana had mastered Hungarian and had proved to be a genius at economizing on their rations; how Elza Hasz, who before that past December had never even known how to boil an egg, had learned to make potato paprikas and chicken soup. There had even been news from Elisabet: She'd had another child, a girl. She was still living on the family estate in Connecticut while Paul served in the navy, but they planned to move to a larger apartment in New York when he returned. Of the possibility of emigrating to the States there had been no word.

  Other possibilities of escape had evaporated. Klein, Klara revealed in a whisper as they paused at a street corner, had been arrested for arranging illegal emigrations. He'd been in jail since the previous November, awaiting trial. She had gone a few times to visit his grandparents, who demonstrated no sign of need. They persisted with their little f
lock of goats in the ancient cottage in Frangepan koz; perhaps the authorities considered them too old to be worth pursuing. The names of Klein's clients--former, current, and would-be emigrants--were concealed in his labyrinth of codes, but there was no telling how long it might be before the police found their way through the maze.

  "And your parents?" she asked. "Are they well?"

  "They're fine," Andras said. "Still sick with worry about Matyas, though. They haven't had a word of news. They weren't pleased to see me looking like this, either. I didn't tell them the half of what happened."

  "Tibor's anxious to see you," she said. "Ilana had to resort to threats to keep him from coming to the station. But his doctor says he's got to rest."

  "How is he? How does he look?"

  Klara sighed. "Thin and exhausted. Quiet. Sometimes he seems to see terrible things in the air between himself and us. Every minute since he's been back he's had Adam in his arms. The boy is so attached to him now, Ilana can hardly feed him."

  "And you?" He put a hand to her hair, her cheek. "Klarika."

  She raised her chin to him and kissed him, there on the street with their child in her arms.

  "Your letters," she said. "If I hadn't had them, I don't know."

  "They can't always have been a comfort."

  Tears came to her eyes again. "I wanted to think I'd miunderstood about Mendel. I read and reread that letter, hoping I was wrong. But it's true, isn't it."

  "Yes, darling, it's true."

  "Sometime soon you'll tell me everything," she said, and took his hand.

  They walked on together until they reached the door of the apartment building. He looked up toward the window he knew to belong to their bedroom; she'd installed a window box full of early crocuses.

  "There's one more piece of news," she said, so gravely that at first he was certain it was news of a death. "There's someone else staying with us now. Someone who traveled a long way to get here."

  "Who?"

  "Come upstairs," she said. "You'll see."

  He followed her into the courtyard, his heartbeat quickening. He wasn't certain he could face a surprise guest. He wanted to sit down on the edge of the fountain at the center of the courtyard, stay there and gather himself for a few days. As they climbed the open stairway he could see the flicker of goldfish in the fountain's green depths.

  They were at the door, and the door opened. There was Tibor, drawn and pale, his eyes full of tears behind his silver-framed glasses. He put his arms around his brother and they held each other in the hallway. Andras inhaled Tibor's faint smell of soap and sebum and clean cotton, not wanting to move or speak. But Tibor led him into the sitting room, where the family was waiting. There was his nephew, Adam, standing beside his mother; Ilana, her hair covered beneath an embroidered kerchief; Gyorgy Hasz, grayer and older; Elza Hasz austere in a cotton work dress; Klara's mother, smaller than ever, her eyes deep and bright. And beyond them, rising from the couch, a pale oval-faced man in a dark jersey that had belonged to Andras, a crumpled handkerchief in his hand.

  Andras experienced a tilt of vertigo. He put a hand on the back of the sofa as the feeling passed through him like a pressure wave.

  Eli

  Polaner.

  "Not possible," Andras said. He looked from Klara to his brother to Ilana, and then again at Polaner himself. "Is it true?" he asked in French.

  "True," Polaner said, in his familiar and long-lost voice.

  It was a nightmare version of a fairy tale, a story grim enough to teach Andras new horrors after what he'd seen in Ukraine. He wished almost that he'd never had to know what had happened to Polaner at the concentration camp in Compiegne where he'd been sent after his removal from the Foreign Legion in 1940--how he'd been beaten and starved and deported half dead to Buchenwald, where he'd spent two years in forced labor and sexual slavery, his arm tattooed with his number, his chest bearing an inverted pink triangle superimposed over an upright yellow one. Polaner's homosexuality had remained a secret until one of his workmates had given up a list of names in exchange for a position as a kapo; afterward, Polaner had found himself at the lowest level of the camp hierarchy, marked with a symbol that made him a target for the guards and kept the other prisoners from getting too close to him. He'd been assigned to the stone quarry, where he hauled bags of crushed rock for fourteen hours a day. When his shift at the quarry was finished, he had to clean the latrines of his barracks block--a reminder, the block sergeant told him, that at this camp he was lower than shit, a servant to shit. Sometimes, late at night, he and a few of the others would be led to a back door of the officers' quarters, where they would be tied and raped, first by one of the officers and then by his secretaries and his orderly.

  One night they had been presented as a secret gift to a visiting dignitary from the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, a high-ranking concentration-camp inspector who was known to enjoy the company of young men. But the exalted official's preferences were not what had been assumed; he was a lover of young men, not a rapist.

  He had the prisoners untied and washed and shaved and dressed in civilian clothes. What he wanted was to engage them in conversation, as though they were all at a party. He had them sit on sofas in his private quarters and share delicacies with him--tea and cakes, when what they'd lived on for the past three years was thin soup and beweeviled bread.

  The inspector was charmed by Polaner's French and his knowledge of contemporary art and architecture. It turned out that the man had known the late vom Rath, to whom he had been a kind of political mentor. By the end of the evening he had decided to have Polaner transferred to his personal service at once. He brought Polaner to his private apartments at another camp a hundred kilometers away, and registered him as a kind of underservant, a hauler of coal and blacker of boots; in actuality Polaner was treated as a patient, kept in bed and nursed by the camp inspector's domestic staff.

  At the end of two months, when Polaner had recovered his health, the inspector performed a kind of alchemy of identity: He had false records drawn up to show that Eli Polaner, the young Jewish man who had been transferred to his service, had contracted meningitis and died; then he procured for Polaner a set of forged papers declaring him to be a young Nazi Party member by the name of Teobald Kreizel, a junior secretary with the Economic-Administrative Main Office. With Polaner dressed as a member of the inspector's staff they traveled to Berlin, where the inspector installed Polaner in a small bright flat on the Behrenstrasse. He left Polaner with fifty thousand reichsmarks in cash and a promise that he would return as soon as possible, bringing with him books and magazines and drawing supplies, phonograph records, black-market delicacies, whatever Polaner might want. Polaner asked only for news of his family; he hadn't heard from his parents or his sisters since he'd entered the Foreign Legion.

  The high-ranking inspector returned as often as he could, bringing the promised drawing supplies and records and delicacies, but he was slow to produce news of Polaner's family. Polaner waited, rarely venturing out of the apartment, thinking of little else but the fact that he might soon learn his parents' and sisters' fate. He nursed a hope that they might have found a way to emigrate, that against the odds they'd gotten themselves to some benign and distant place, Argentina or Australia or America; or, failing that, that the inspector might be able to lift them out of whatever hell they'd fallen into, might reunite them all in a neutral city where they would be safe. It wasn't an entirely baseless hope; the inspector had often used his position to arrange favors for his lovers and proteges. In fact, during the six months Polaner lived on the Behrenstrasse, those past favors took their toll: a series of irregularities came to the attention of the inspector's superiors, and the inspector fell under investigation. Fearing for his position and for Polaner's life, the inspector concluded that Polaner must leave the country at once. He promised to get Polaner a visa that would allow him to travel anywhere within the area of the Reich's influence. But what was Polaner supposed to do?
Where was he supposed to go? News of his parents had failed to arrive; how was he to choose a destination?

  Later that same week, the first week of January, 1943, the inspector's inquiries about Polaner's family yielded answers at last. Polaner's parents and sisters had died in a labor camp at Plaszow--his mother and father in February of 1941, and his sisters eight and ten months later. The Nazis had appropriated his family home and the textile factory in Krakow. There was nothing left.

  The night he received the news, Polaner had removed the gun from his bedside table--the inspector insisted he keep a pistol for protection--and had gone out onto the balcony and stood there in his nightclothes, in a cataract of freezing wind. He put the gun to his temple and leaned over the balcony railing. The snow below him was like an eiderdown, he told Andras--soft-looking, hillocked, blue-white; he imagined falling into that clean blankness and disappearing beneath a layer of new snow. The gun in his hand was an SS officer's Walther P-38, a double-action pistol with a round in the chamber. He cocked the hammer and put a finger against the curve of the trigger, envisioned the bullet shattering the ingenious architecture of his skull. He would count to three and do it: eins, tsvey, dray. But as the Yiddish numbers sounded in his mind, he experienced a moment of clarity: If he killed himself with this gun, this Walther P-38--if he did this because the Nazis had killed his parents and sisters--then they, the Nazis, would be the ones who had killed him, the ones who had silenced the Yiddish inside his head. They would have succeeded at killing his entire family. He removed his finger from the trigger, reset the safety, and slid the round out of the chamber. It was the bullet, and not Polaner himself, that fell three stories to that eiderdown of snow.