The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  Civilians rushed toward the river with their dogs and bags and children, but the bridges were under bombardment. In the whole city there was nothing left to eat. Klara received the last piece of news with the understanding that she would watch her children die. Later that night, when a shallow panicked sleep overtook her, she dreamed of feeding her own right hand to the children; she felt no pain, only a relief that she had arrived at this ingenious solution.

  In the morning she woke to an unaccustomed quiet. In place of gunfire there was a resonant stillness. Now and then a burst of shots cut through the morning air, and from the west bank of the Danube, where the fighting continued, came the faint echo of battle.

  But the battle for Pest was over. The bridges had all been destroyed; the Soviets held the city. The last Nazis in Pest had been taken as prisoners of war, or were cowering in buildings where they had made others cower. In the Red Cross shelter, the women waited for some sign of what to do. They were faint with thirst and hunger, sick with grief; though the building had withstood the night's bombing, two more babies had died. The children who had survived were quieter that day, as if they knew something had changed.

  By midday the shelter residents came out of the building and into the cold gray light of Szabadsag ter. What they saw seemed like an image from a newsreel or a dream: the American flag flying brazenly above the shuttered embassy. Two Arrow Cross soldiers lay dead on the embassy steps, the breasts of their overcoats tattered with bullet holes. A pair of Russian military policemen stood at the edge of the square and stared at the smoking dome of the Parliament building. The director of the shelter crossed the square toward the Russian men and fell to her knees before them; they could understand nothing she said, but they offered her their canteens.

  That afternoon, the inhabitants of the shelter began to leave in search of food and water. Klara and Polaner lined the babies' carriages with extra blankets and packed them with what remained of what they'd brought. Into Adam's empty carriage they put Tamas, who, for the past week, had had nothing to eat but the scant trickle of Klara's milk. Into the other carriage they put the new baby. Klara, blind with exhaustion, could scarcely walk. They made their way through the rubble of the city, not knowing where they were going; they steered the carriages around crashed planes, horse carcasses, exploded German tanks, fallen chimneys, piles of rubbish, bodies of soldiers, bodies of women. At the corner of Kiraly and Kazinczy utca they came across a group of Russian soldiers shoveling rubble into the back of a truck. Their leader, a decorated officer, stopped Klara and Polaner and made a loud demand in Russian. They knew he wanted their papers, but Polaner's papers could only have gotten him arrested or shot; he replied in Hungarian that Klara was his wife and that they were bringing the children home. For a long time the officer looked at the gaunt, hollow-eyed Klara and Polaner, and peered into the carriages at the silent children. Finally he reached into the pocket of his coat and brought out a photograph of a round-faced woman with a round-faced child seated on her knee. While Klara held the photograph, the soldier went to the cab of the truck and took out a canvas rucksack. Kneeling, he drew out a paper bag that bulged as though it contained stones, then reached into the bag and withdrew a handful of wizened hazelnuts. These he passed to Klara. A second handful of nuts went to Polaner.

  On those two handfuls of food, Klara would nurse both children for a week.

  Because there was nowhere else to go, they went to the ghetto, which had been liberated by the Russians earlier that day. There, at the gates of the Great Synagogue on Dohany utca, they found Klein's grandmother holding the single goat kid she'd nursed through the siege. Klein's grandfather, that tiny bright-eyed man with his two uplifted wings of hair, had died of a stroke the first week of January. He'd been taken to the courtyard of the synagogue, where hundreds of Jewish dead lay waiting to be buried.

  What about my mother? Klara had asked. What about my brother's wife?

  And in the same grief-raked voice, Klein's grandmother delivered the news that Elza Hasz and Klara's mother had been shot, along with forty others, in the courtyard of a building on Wesselenyi utca. She spoke the words with lowered eyes as she stroked the head of the last surviving kid, the remnant of the urban flock that had saved the lives of thirty women and children at Szabadsag ter.

  In the courtyard of the synagogue at Bethlen Gabor ter, where the concentration-camp survivors were supposed to register when they returned, those who had remained in Budapest begged the camp survivors for news of those who hadn't come home. Nearly every day until Andras's return, Klara had gone to that synagogue. Though she feared the answers to her questions, she had asked and asked. One week she met a man who'd been in a camp in Germany with her brother; they'd been workmates at an armaments factory there. This man took her into the synagogue sanctuary, where he sat down with her in a pew, took her hands in his own, and told her that her brother was dead. He'd been shot on New Year's Eve along with twenty-five others.

  For a week she sat shivah for him at the house on Frangepan koz; as far as she knew, she was the only member of their family still alive. Then she went back to the synagogue again, hoping for news of Andras. Instead she learned something that she must tell him now. A woman from Debrecen had come to Bethlen Gabor ter to look for her children. Not long before, this woman had been in a camp herself; she had been in Oswiecim, in Poland. She had seen Andras's parents on a railroad embankment there, before she herself had been moved into a group of those who were well enough to work.

  Of the other group, the old and sick and very young, nothing more had been seen, nothing heard.

  As Klara delivered the news, Andras began to shake with silent grief. Jozsef sat beside him in hollow-eyed shock. In a single day, in this strange small house filled with photographs of the dead, they had both become orphans.

  ...

  For months after Andras came home, they went to the synagogue at Bethlen Gabor ter every day. Hungarian Jews were being exhumed from graves all over Austria and Germany, Ukraine and Yugoslavia, and, whenever it was possible, identified by their papers or their dog tags. There were thousands of them. Every day, on the wall outside the building, endless lists of names. Abraham. Almasy. Arany. Banki. Bohm. Braun.

  Breuer. Budai. Csato. Czitrom. Daniel. Diamant. Einstein. Eisenkberger. Engel. Fischer.

  Goldman. Goldner. Goldstein. Hart. Hauszmann. Heller. Hirsch. Honig. Horovitz. Idesz.

  Janos. Jaskiseri. Kemeny. Kepecs. Kertesz. Klein. Kovacs. Langer. Lazar. Lindenfeld.

  Markovitz. Marton. Nussbaum. Ocsai. Paley. Pollak. Rona. Rosenthal. Roth. Rubiczek.

  Rubin. Schoenfeld. Sebestyen. Sebok. Steiner. Szanto. Toronyi. Ungar. Vadas. Vamos.

  Vertes. Vida. Weisz. Wolf. Zeller. Zindler. Zucker. An alphabet of loss, a catalogue of grief. Almost every time they went, they witnessed someone learning that a person they loved had died. Sometimes the news would be received in silence, the only evidence a whitening of the skin around the mouth, or a tremor in the hands that clutched a hat.

  Other times there would be screams, protests, weeping. They looked day after day, every day, for so long that they almost forgot what they were looking for; after a while it seemed they were just looking, trying to memorize a new Kaddish composed entirely of names.

  Then, one afternoon in early August--eight hours before the Enola Gay's flight over Hiroshima, and eight days before end of the Second World War--as they stood scanning the lists of dead, Klara's hand flew to her mouth and her shoulders curled. In that first moment Andras wondered only who she could have had left to lose; it didn't occur to him that her reaction might have anything to do with him. But he must have sensed unconsciously what had happened. When he looked at the list, he found he couldn't bring the names into focus.

  Klara held his arm, trembling. "Oh, Andras," she said. "Tibor. Oh, God."

  He moved away from her, unwilling to understand. He looked at the list again but couldn't make sense of it. Already people were stepping away from them, giving t
hem a respectful space, the way they did when people found their dead. He stepped forward and touched the list where it bled from K to L. Katz, Adolf. Kovaly, Sarah. Laszlo, Bela.

  Lebowitz, Kati. Levi, Tibor.

  It couldn't be his Tibor. He said this aloud: It's not him. It's someone else. It's not our Tibor. Not our Tibor. A mistake. He pushed his way through the crowd around the list, toward the door of the synagogue, up the stairs to the administrative offices, where an explanation would be found. He terrified a woman at a desk by roaring for the person in charge. She took him to an anteroom where, unbelievably, they made him wait. Klara found him there; her eyes were red, and he thought, Ridiculous. Not our Tibor. And in the office of the person in charge, he sat in an ancient leather chair while the man leafed through manila envelopes. He handed one to Andras, labeled with the name L EVI. The envelope held a brief typewritten note and a metal dog-tag locket, its clasp twisted. When Andras opened the dog tag he found the inner document still intact: Tibor's name, his date and place of birth, his height and eye color and weight, the name of his commanding officer, his home address, his Munkaszolgalat number. Your dog tags might come home, but you never will. The brief typewritten note stated that the tag had been found on Tibor's body in a mass grave in Hidegseg, near the Austrian border.

  That night Andras locked himself into the bedroom of the new apartment he shared with Klara and Polaner and the children. He sat on the floor, cried aloud, beat his head against the cold red tile. He would never leave that room, he decided; would stay there until he was an old man, and let the earth burn through its years around him.

  Sometime in the night, Klara and Polaner came in and helped him to bed. In the vaguest way, he was aware of Klara unbuttoning his shirt, of Polaner sliding his arms into a new one; vaguely, through a veil, he saw Klara washing her face at the basin and getting into bed beside him. Her arm across his chest was a warm live thing, and he was dead beneath it. He couldn't move to touch her or respond to anything she said. He lay spent and exhausted and awake, listening as her breathing fell into its familiar rhythm of sleep. He saw Tibor in those last weeks, the nightmare of their life at Sopron: Tibor going to the village for food. Tibor overturning Andras and Jozsef's bowl of beans. Tibor bathing Andras's forehead with a cold cloth. Tibor covering him with his own overcoat.

  Tibor walking thirty kilometers with a handful of strawberry jam. Tibor reminding him that it was Tamas's birthday. Then he thought of Tibor in Budapest, his eyes dark behind his silver-rimmed glasses. Tibor in Paris, lying on Andras's floor in an agony of love for Ilana. Tibor hauling Andras's bags to Keleti Station one September morning a lifetime ago. Tibor at the opera, the night before Andras's departure. Tibor dragging an extra mattress up the stairs to his own small room on Harsfa utca. Tibor in high school, a biology book open on the table before him. Tibor as a tall young boy, chasing Andras through the orchard, throwing him to the ground. Tibor pulling Andras from the millpond. Tibor bending over Andras where he sat on the kitchen floor, tipping a spoonful of sweet milk into his mouth.

  He turned over and pulled Klara against him, cried and cried into the damp nebula of her hair.

  There was a funeral at the Jewish cemetery outside the city, a reburial of Tibor's remains and the remains of hundreds of others, a field of open graves, a thousand mourners. Afterward, for the second time that year, he observed a week of shivah. He and Klara burned a memorial candle and ate hard-boiled eggs, sat on the floor in silence, received a stream of guests. In accordance with the ritual, Andras did not shave for thirty days. He hid inside his beard, forgot to change his clothes, bathed only when Klara insisted. He had to work; he knew he couldn't afford to lose his new job as a dismantler of bombed buildings. But he performed the work without speaking to the other men or seeing the houses he was taking apart or thinking of the people who had lived in them.

  After work he sat in the front room of the apartment they'd taken on Pozsonyi ut, or in a dark corner of the bedroom, sometimes holding one of the children on his lap, stroking the baby's hair or listening as Tamas described what had happened at the park that morning. He ate little, couldn't concentrate on a book or newspaper, didn't want to go out for a walk with Jozsef and Polaner. He said Kaddish every day. It seemed to him he could live this way forever, could make a permanent employment of grief. Klara, whose motherhood had prevented her from sinking into an all-consuming mourning for her own mother and Gyorgy and Elza, understood and indulged him; and Polaner, whose grief had been as deep as Andras's own, knew that even this abyss had a bottom, and that Andras would reach it soon.

  He could not have anticipated how, or when. It came on a Sunday exactly a month after the funeral, the day Andras shaved his mourning beard. They were sitting at the breakfast table, eating barley porridge with goats' milk; food was still scarce, and as the weather turned colder they had begun to wonder whether, having survived the war itself, they would die of its aftermath. Klara spooned her own porridge into the children's mouths. Andras, who could not eat, passed his along to her. Jozsef and Polaner sat with the newspaper spread between them, Polaner reading aloud about the Communist Party's struggle to recruit members before the upcoming general election.

  It was Andras who rose when they heard a knock at the door. He crossed the room, drawing his robe closer against the morning chill; he unlocked the door and opened it. A red-faced young man stood on the doorstep, a knapsack on his back. His cap bore the Soviet military insignia. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and drew out a letter.

  "I've been charged to deliver this to Andras or Tibor Levi," the man said.

  "Charged by whom?" Andras said. With numb dispassion he noted how strange it was to hear his brother's name in this soldier's mouth. Tibor Levi. As if he were still alive.

  "By Matyas Levi," the man said. "I was with him at a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia."

  And so, Andras thought. The final piece of news. Matyas dead, and this his last missive. He felt himself to be in a place so remote from human feeling, so far removed from the ability to experience pain or hope or love, that he did not hesitate to take the letter. He opened it as the young man stood watching, as his family looked at him for the news. And he learned that his brother Matyas lived, and would be home the following Tuesday.

  In the winter of 1942, just a month after he'd been sent to Ukraine, Matyas Levi had been taken prisoner by the Soviets, and along with the rest of his labor company had been sent to a mining camp in Siberia. The location was the region of Kolyma, bounded by the Arctic Ocean to the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. They'd gone via the Trans-Siberian Railway to the end of its easternmost spike at Vladivostok, and then had been transported across the sea on the slave ship Dekabrist. The camp had two thousand inmates, Germans and Ukrainians and Hungarians and Serbs and Poles and Nazi-sympathizing French, along with Soviet criminals and political dissidents and writers and composers and artists. In the camp he'd been beaten with clubs and shovels and pickhandles. He'd been bitten by bedbugs and flies and lice. He'd been frozen almost to death. He'd worked seventeen-hour days at seventy degrees below zero, had received a daily ration of twenty decagrams of bread, had been thrown into isolation for disobedience, had nearly died of dysentery, had earned the respect of the guards and officers by painting bold Communist posters for the barracks walls, had been named official propaganda-poster designer and official snow sculptor of the camp (he had made ten-foot-high busts of Lenin and Stalin to preside over the parade ground), had learned Russian and had volunteered as a translator, had been called upon to interview Hungarian Nazis, had seen a hundred Arrow Cross members brought to trial and sentenced and in some cases executed, had been attacked by a secret coalition of Hungarian Arrow Cross members who broke both his legs, had convalesced in the infirmary for six months, and finally had been informed one morning that his time at the prison camp was through, and when he'd asked what had earned him the privilege of release, had been told that it was because his official designation, and
that of five hundred twenty other prisoners, had been changed from Jewish Hungarian to Hungarian Jew, and that the prison camp was not in the business of detaining Jews, not after what the Nazis had done to them.

  But nothing that happened to him those three cold years had prepared him for what waited at home. Nothing had prepared him for the news that four hundred thousand of Hungary's Jews had been sent to death camps in Poland; nothing had prepared him for the bombed ruin of Budapest with its six severed bridges. And nothing had prepared him for the news that his mother and father, his brother and his sister-in-law and his nephew, had all vanished from the earth. It was Andras who delivered the news. Matyas, grown into a lean, hard-eyed man with a short dark beard, sat before him on the sofa and took it in without a sound; the only sign he gave of having understood at all was a faint trembling of the jaw. He got up and smoothed his pant legs, as if, having been given a military briefing, he was ready now to incorporate the news into his plans and move onward. And then something seemed to change beneath the skin of his face, as though his muscles had received the news on a longdistance telephone delay. He went to his knees on the floor, his features twisting with grief. "Not true," he cried, and moved his arms around his head as if birds were flying at him. It was the news, Andras thought, the unrelenting news, a troop of crows circling, their wings smelling of ash.

  He knelt beside his brother and put his arms around him, held him against his own chest as Matyas wailed. He said his brother's name aloud, as if to remind him of the astonishing fact that at least, he, Matyas, still lived. He would not let go until Matyas pulled away and looked around at the unfamiliar room; when his eyes came to rest on Andras's again, they were lucid and full of despair. Is it true? he seemed to be asking, though he hadn't said a word. Tell me honestly. Is it true?