The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  Andras held Matyas's gaze steady in his own. There was no need to speak or to make any sign. He put his arm around Matyas's shoulder again, drew him close and held him as he cried.

  It was Andras who sat with him that night and the next and the one after that, Andras who urged him to eat and who changed the damp bedding on the sofa where he slept. As he did these things he felt the first thinning of the fog that had enveloped him since he'd learned that Tibor was dead. Over the past month he'd nearly forgotten how to be a man in the world, how to breathe and eat and sleep and speak to other people. He had let himself slip away, even though Klara and the children had survived the war, the siege; even though Polaner was there with him every day. On the third night after Matyas's return, after Matyas had fallen asleep and he and Klara had retreated to their bedroom, Andras took her hands and begged her forgiveness.

  "You know there's nothing to forgive," she said.

  "I vowed to take care of you. I want to be a husband to you again."

  "You've never stopped," she said.

  He bent to kiss her; she was alive, his Klara, and she was there in his arms. Nest of my children, he thought, placing a hand on her womb. Cradle of my joy. And he remembered her with an orange-red dahlia behind her ear, and the way her skin felt beneath a film of bathwater, and what it was like to meet her eye and to know they were thinking the same thing. And he believed, for the first time since he had seen Tibor's name on the list at Bethlen Gabor ter, that it might be possible to live beyond that terrible year; that he might look into Klara's face, whose planes and curves he knew more intimately than any landscape in the world, and feel something like peace. And he took her to bed and made love to her as if for the first time in his life.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  A Name

  THE MORNING was crisp and blue, early December. From the window of their building on Pozsonyi ut, Andras could see a line of schoolchildren being led into Szent Istvan Park--gray woolen coats, crimson scarves, black boots that left herringbones of footprints in the snow. Beyond the park was the marbled span of the Danube. Farther still was the white prow of Margaret Island, where in the summertime Tamas and Aprilis swam at Palatinus Strand. When, on a walk through the park last spring, he'd told them that the pool had once been closed to Jewish swimmers, Aprilis had looked at him with pinched brows.

  "I don't see what being Jewish has to do with swimming," she said.

  "Neither do I," Andras said, and put a hand at the nape of her neck, where her little gold chain closed. But Tamas had looked through the fence at the pool complex, his hands on the green-painted bars, then turned to meet his father's eyes. He knew by now what had happened to his family during the war, what had happened to his uncles and grandparents. He had gone to Konyar and Debrecen with his father to see where Andras had lived as a boy, and where Andras's parents had lived; he had watched his father place a stone on the doorstep of the house in Konyar as if at a grave.

  "I'm going to train for the Olympics here," he said. "I'll set a new world record."

  "Me too," Aprilis said. "I'll set a record in freestyle and backstroke."

  "I have no doubt you will," Andras said.

  That was before the escape had come to seem like a reality, before the children had begun to envision their future lives taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. It wouldn't be long now; only a few details remained, including the business Andras would conclude that morning at the Ministry of the Interior. Tamas had wanted to come along with Andras and Klara and Matyas to pick up the new identification cards. Last night he'd stood before Andras in the sitting room with a grave expression on his face, his arms crossed over his chest. He had already prepared his lessons for the next two days, he announced. He'd miss nothing at all by going with them.

  "You have to go to school," Andras said. He rose from his chair and put an arm around Tamas's shoulders. "You don't want the students in America to get ahead of you."

  "I'm not worried about that," Tamas said. "Not if I miss just one afternoon. They get Saturdays and Sundays off every week."

  "I'll leave your new papers on your desk," Andras said. "They'll be waiting for you when you get home from school."

  Tamas sent a glance toward Klara, who sat at her writing desk by the window; she shook her head and said, "You heard your father."

  Shrugging, sighing, declaring it all to be unfair, Tamas gave up the argument and loped off down the hallway to his room. "As if I'd get behind," they heard him say as he closed the bedroom door.

  Klara lifted her eyes to Andras, trying to restrain her laughter. "He's been a grown man for years, hasn't he?" she said. "What on earth will he do in America, among those kids with their banana splits and their rock and roll?"

  "He'll eat banana splits and listen to rock and roll," Andras predicted, which turned out, in fact, to be true.

  Andras and Matyas had taken the day off work to go to the Ministry of the Interior. They were employed at Magyar Nation, one of the secondary communist newspapers, where they directed the design department; they had been up late the previous night judging a contest of winter-themed drawings by gimnazium students. The winning drawing had depicted a skating race, athletics being a safe subject under the judging regulations, which disqualified any drawing that made reference to Christmas.

  That holiday belonged to the old Hungary, at least officially. Of course, people still celebrated it; they were relying on that fact, all of them--Andras and Matyas, Klara and Tamas and Aprilis. In a few weeks, on Christmas Eve, they would take a train to Sopron, and then they would walk six miles in the snow to a place where they might cross the Austrian border unnoticed; they would slip through while the border patrol drank vodka and listened to Christmas carols in their warm quarters. In Austria they would catch a train that would take them to Vienna, where Polaner had been living since his own border crossing in November. From there they would travel together to Salzburg, and then to Marseilles. On the tenth of January, if all went well, they would board an ocean liner for New York, where Jozsef Hasz had secured an apartment for them.

  But first they had to settle the business about the name change and the new identity cards. They had submitted the application eight weeks earlier, in October; it had gotten delayed, like all other government business, in the confusion surrounding the abortive revolution that fall. Even now, less than a month after it had been quelled, Andras found it difficult to believe the revolution had occurred--that the public debates of the Petofi Society, a small group of Budapest intellectuals, had blossomed into vast student demonstrations; that the students and their supporters had unseated Erno Gero, Moscow's puppet, and had installed the reformist Imre Nagy as prime minister; that they had pulled down the twenty-meter-high statue of Stalin near Heroes' Square, and planted Hungarian flags in his empty boots. The demonstrators had called for free elections, a multiparty system, a free press. They wanted Hungary to disengage from the Warsaw Pact, and more than anything they wanted the Red Army to go home. They wanted to be Hungarian again, even after what it had meant to be Hungarian during the war. And at first, Khrushchev had conceded. He had recognized Nagy as prime minister, and began to call the occupying troops back to Russia. For a few days in late October it seemed to Andras that the Hungarian Revolution would be the swiftest, the cleanest, the most successful revolution Europe had ever known. Then Polaner came home one afternoon having heard a rumor that Soviet tanks were massing at the Romanian and Ruthenian borders. That evening, in the Erzsebetvaros cafe where Andras and Polaner went to hear Jewish artists and writers argue long into the night, the item of hottest debate was whether the Western nations would come to Hungary's aid. Radio Free Europe had led many to believe it would be so, but others insisted that no Western nation would risk itself for a Soviet-bloc state. The cynics turned out to be correct. France and Britain, preoccupied with the Suez Crisis, scarcely cast an eye toward Central Europe; America was caught up in a presidential election, and kept to itself.

  Mor
e

  than

  twenty-five

  hundred people were killed, and nineteen thousand

  wounded, when Khrushchev's tanks and planes arrived to crush the uprising. Imre Nagy had hidden himself in the Yugoslav embassy, and was imprisoned as soon as he emerged.

  Within days the fighting was over. In the weeks that followed, nearly two hundred thousand people fled to the West--among them Polaner, whose image had appeared in one of the many newspapers that had arisen during Hungary's fortnight of freedom. He had been photographed tending a young woman who'd been shot in the leg at Heroes'

  Square; the woman turned out to be a student organizer, and Polaner had been tagged as a revolutionary. Grim tales of torture had emerged from the Secret Police detainment center at 60 Andrassy ut; rather than test their truth, Polaner had decided to risk the border crossing. To his good fortune, and that of the two hundred thousand refugees, the brief conflict had left the Iron Curtain riddled with holes: Many of the border guards had been called in to fight smaller uprisings in the towns and cities of the interior.

  Those conflicts, too, had since been put down, but the border remained more permeable than it had been for years. It was decided that the rest of the family would follow Polaner. How long now had they been waiting for a chance to leave? There was no future for them in Hungary. They'd known it to be true before the revolution, and it was all the more apparent now. Jozsef Hasz, who had made his own escape to New York five years earlier, had been at pains to convince them that they were fools to stay. He had found them the apartment and promised to help them find work. Tamas and Aprilis were old enough to make the border crossing on foot; Christmas Eve would provide the aperture. So at last they decided to take the risk. They had written the news, in carefully veiled language, to Jozsef and Elisabet and Paul. And now, on the other side of the ocean, Elisabet was beginning to prepare the apartment, furnishing the rooms and laying in everything they would need. Andras had resisted thinking about the flat itself; such detailed imagining of their future lives seemed to invite bad luck. But he and Klara told the children about the junior high and high schools they would attend, the movie theaters with their pink neon-lit towers, the stores with great bins of fruit from all over the world.

  Elisabet had been writing to them about those things for years; by now they had attained the quality of images from a legend.

  Even more fantastical to Andras was the prospect of returning to school himself, the prospect of finishing his degree in architecture. He and Polaner had made a pact to do it, and Matyas had agreed to join them. For the past eleven years, exhausted by their daily work, Andras and Polaner had struggled to retain what they'd learned at the Ecole Speciale. They had set each other exercises, had challenged each other to solve problems of design. They had even attended a few night classes, but had been so dispirited by the dullness of Soviet architecture that they had found themselves unwilling to continue.

  New York presented a different prospect. They knew nothing of the schools there, but Jozsef had written that the city was full of them. He and Polaner had sworn their pact over glasses of Tokaji on the evening of Polaner's departure.

  "We'll be old men among boys," Andras had said. "I can see us now."

  "We're not old," Polaner said. "We're not even forty."

  "Don't you remember what it was like? I don't know if I have the stamina."

  "What's going to happen?" Polaner said. "Are you going to get a nosebleed?"

  "Without a doubt. And that'll be just the beginning."

  "Here's to the beginning," Polaner said, and two hours later he had disappeared into the uncertain night, carrying only his knapsack and a green metal tube of drawings.

  Now, on this clear December morning, Klara stood beside Andras at the window, following his gaze toward the park and the river. After the war she had left off teaching and had turned her attention to choreography. The Soviets loved that she had been trained by a Russian and spoke the language; never mind that her teacher had been a White Russian who had fled Petersburg in 1917. The Hungarian National Ballet gave her a permanent position, and the state newspaper praised the strength and angularity of her work. K. Levi is a choreographer in the true Soviet style, the official dance critic wrote; and Klara, who for years had been plotting her family's defection to the United States, sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper in her hand and laughed.

  "Time to go," she said now. "Matyas will be waiting."

  Andras helped her into her gray coat and draped a cinnamon-colored scarf around her neck. "You're as lovely as ever," he said, touching her sleeve. "You used to wear a red hat in Paris. You'll have one again in America."

  "As ever!" she said. "Has it come to that? Am I so old?"

  "Ageless," he said. "Timeless."

  They met Matyas at the corner of Pozsonyi ut and Szent Istvan korut. In honor of the occasion he had worn a pink carnation in his buttonhole, a gesture that seemed to recall his younger self. He had returned from Siberia hardened and sharpened into a man, a fierce aggressive light radiating from his eyes. He had never returned to dancing, would never again wear a top hat, white tie, and tails. The part of him that had been inclined toward the physical expression of joy had been carved away in Siberia. But now, on the day of the name change, a pink carnation.

  Klara pressed Andras's arm as they crossed Perczel Mor utca. "I brought the camera," she said. "I hope you're feeling photogenic."

  "As ever," said Andras, who detested any photograph of himself. But Matyas straightened the carnation in his buttonhole and struck a pose against a streetlight.

  "Not yet," Klara said. "After we get the documents."

  They arrived at the gray monolith that housed the Ministry of the Interior--a building, Andras recalled, that stood in the footprint of the eighteenth-century palace of a famous courtesan. The palace had been destroyed in the siege of 1944, but a single elm that appeared in engravings of the building still stood behind its low iron fence. Andras touched the bark as if for luck, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a city where he would not see ghosts of buildings and people everywhere he looked, where what existed now was all there was for him. Then he and Matyas and Klara climbed the steps and entered the glass-and-concrete cavern of the building. They waited for an hour while the man in charge of name changes fingered his way through an endless series of documents, each of which had to be stamped thrice and signed by elusive functionaries before it could be delivered. But finally their name was called--their old name, one last time--and they had the papers in hand: new identification cards and work cards and residency certificates. Documents, Andras hoped, that would soon be of no use to them at all. But it had seemed important to know that the new name had been recorded in Hungarian record books, important that it be made official.

  Outside, the high blue sky had gone metallic gray, and they stepped into a cloud of falling snow. Klara ran down the steps to prepare the camera while Andras and Matyas stood with the new documents in their hands. Andras had not expected the sight of the cards and papers to bring tears to his eyes, but now he found himself weeping. It had become real at last: this memorial, this mark they would carry all their lives and pass to their children and grandchildren.

  "Stop that," Matyas said, drawing the back of his sleeve across his own eyes. "It won't change anything."

  He was right, of course. Nothing would change what had happened--not grief, not time, not memory, not retribution. But they could leave this place, would leave it in a few weeks. They could cross an ocean and live in a city where Aprilis might grow up without the gravity that had marked her brother, without the sense of tragedy that seemed to hang in the air like the brown dust of bituminous coal. And Andras would become a student again--if not the young man who had arrived in Paris with a suitcase and a scholarship, then a man who knew something more of both the beauty and the ugliness of the world.

  And Klara would be with him--Klara, who stood before them now with her dark hair blowi
ng, her hands raised, the camera hiding her face behind its glass eye. He put his arm around his brother and said, "Ready." She counted to three in English, a daring act in the shadow of the Ministry of the Interior. And she captured them, the two men on the steps: Andras and Matyas Tibor.

  Epilogue

  IN THE SPRING, on afternoons when she didn't have soccer practice, she would skip her last class--orchestra--and take the 6 uptown to her grandfather's building. She thought of it that way, his building, though he didn't live there or own it. It was a four-story building set at an angle to the street; the facade was made up of hundreds of small rectangles of steel-framed glass, shunted skyward in a violent and asymmetrical upward thrust, like an exploding Japanese screen. Slim birches grew in the trapezoid of earth between building and sidewalk. The marble lintel above the door read A MOS M

  USEUM OF C ONTEMPORARY A RT; her grandfather's name was chiseled into the cornerstone, above the word A RCHITECT. The building housed a small collection of paintings and sculptures and photographs she'd seen a thousand times. In its central courtyard was a cafe where she always ordered her coffee black. At thirteen she considered herself on the cusp of womanhood. She liked to sit at a table and write letters to her brother at Brown, or to her friends from camp in the Berkshires. She would sit for hours, almost until dinnertime, and then she would run to catch the express, hoping to make it back to the apartment before her parents got home from work.