The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  Her grandparents didn't live in the city. They lived upstate, down the road from her great-uncle, and five miles away from the man whom she called uncle but who was her grandfather's friend. Sometimes she went to visit them on weekends. Three hours by train, which passed quickly if you had a window seat. Her grandfather had a barn he'd converted into a workshop, with high windows that let in northern light. They all worked there still, her grandfather and her great-uncle and her not-uncle uncle, though they were old enough to retire. They let her sit at their sloping desks and use their ink-stained tools.

  She liked to draw oblique entryways, fractured rooflines, curvilinear facades. They gave her books about architects they'd known, Le Corbusier and Pingusson. They taught her the Latin names of arches and showed her how to use the French curve and the beam compass. They taught her the single-stroke Roman lettering they used to label their plans.

  They had lived through the war. Every now and then it drifted into their speech: During the war, and then a story about how little they'd had to eat, or how they'd survived the cold, or how long they'd gone without seeing each other. She'd learned about that war in school, of course--who had died, who killed whom, how, and why--though her books hadn't had much to say about Hungary. She'd learned other things about the war from watching her grandmother, who saved plastic bags and glass jars, and kept bottles of water in the house in case of disaster, and made layer cakes with half as much butter and sugar as the recipes called for, and who, at times, would begin to cry for no reason. And she'd learned about it from her father, who'd been hardly more than a baby at the time but who could remember walking with his mother through ruins.

  There were strands of darker stories. She didn't know how she'd heard them; she thought she must have absorbed them through her skin, like medicine or poison.

  Something about labor camps. Something about being made to eat newspapers.

  Something about a disease that came from lice. Even when she wasn't thinking about those half stories, they did their work in her mind. A few weeks ago she'd had a dream from which she'd woken shouting in fright. She and her parents had been standing in a cold black-walled room, wearing pajamas made of flour sacks. In a corner her grandmother knelt on the concrete floor, weeping. Her grandfather stood before them, too thin, unshaven. A German guard came out of the shadows and made him climb onto a raised conveyor belt, something like the luggage carousel at the airport. The guard put cuffs around his ankles and wrists, then stepped to a wooden lever beside the conveyor belt and pushed it forward. A meshing of gears, a grinding of iron teeth. The belt began to move. Her grandfather rounded a corner and disappeared into a rectangle of light, from beyond which came a deafening clap that meant he was dead.

  That was when she'd shouted herself awake.

  Her parents had come running into the room. What is it? What is it?

  You don't want to know.

  Today she sat in the courtyard with her notebook and her bitter coffee, the first time she'd been there since the dream. It was a deep blue afternoon, sun slanting through the courtyard in a way that reminded her of the north woods and camp. But she couldn't stop thinking about the conveyor belt and that deafening shock of noise. She couldn't concentrate on writing to her brother. She couldn't drink her coffee, or even take a deep breath. She reminded herself that her grandfather wasn't dead. Her grandmother wasn't dead. And her great-uncle, and the uncle who wasn't her uncle--none of them were dead.

  Even her father had survived, and his sister, her aunt Aprilis, who'd been born in the middle of it all.

  But then there was the other great-uncle, the one who had died. He'd had a wife, and his son would have been her father's age now. They had all died in the war. Her grandparents almost never talked about them, and when they did, they spoke in lowered voices. All that was left of that uncle was a photograph taken when he was twenty years old. He was handsome, with a strong jaw and heavy dark hair, and he wore a pair of silver-framed glasses. He didn't look like someone who expected to die. He looked like he was supposed to live to be a white-haired old man like his brothers.

  Instead there was just that photograph. And their last name, a memorial.

  She wanted to hear the whole story: what that brother had been like as a boy, what he'd been good at in school, what he'd wanted to do with his life, where he'd lived, who he'd loved, how he'd died. If her own brother died, she would tell her granddaughter everything about him. If her granddaughter asked.

  Maybe that was the problem: She hadn't asked. Or maybe even now they didn't want to talk about it. But she would ask, next time she went to visit. It seemed right that they should tell her, now that she was thirteen. She wasn't a child anymore. She was old enough now to know.

  Any Case

  It could have happened.

  It had to happen.

  It happened earlier. Later.

  Closer. Farther away.

  It happened, but not to you.

  You survived because you were first.

  You survived because you were last.

  Because alone. Because the others.

  Because on the left. Because on the right.

  Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.

  Because a shadow fell.

  Luckily there was a forest.

  Luckily there were no trees.

  Luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,

  a frame, a turn, an inch, a second.

  Luckily a straw was floating on the water.

  Thanks to, thus, in spite of, and yet.

  What would have happened if a hand, a leg,

  One step, a hair away?

  So you are here? Straight from that moment still suspended?

  The net's mesh was tight, but you? through the mesh?

  I can't stop wondering at it, can't be silent enough.

  Listen,

  How quickly your heart is beating in me.

  --Wislawa

  Szymborska

  translated from the Polish by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Deepest gratitude to everyone who helped bring this novel to its final state. The National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library provided invaluable gifts of time and freedom.

  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris, the library of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture, the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center, and the National Jewish Museum of Budapest gave me access to artifacts and documents that made the history tangible. Zsuzsa Toronyi of the National Hungarian Jewish Archives in Budapest led me to the Munkaszolgalat newspapers, and Gabor Nagy was a subtle and insightful translator. CUNY professor emeritus Randolph Braham documented the Hungarian Holocaust in his career-long study of the subject, and particularly in The Politics of Genocide, which was an infallible guide; on a snowy day in February he met with me to answer questions of geography and Hungarian military ranking. The USC

  Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education provided many hours of videotaped interviews. Killian O'Sullivan gave detailed architectural advice. Professor Brian Porter at the University of Michigan offered insight into twentieth-century Central European politics and history. Kenneth Turan answered my Yiddish questions. Alice Hudson at the New York Public Library unearthed wartime maps of Budapest and Paris.

  Professor Edgar Rosenberg at Cornell led me to Gerald Schwab's The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan.

  Jordan Pavlin at Knopf offered unflagging patience, encouragement, and the most sensitive and painstaking editing. Kimberly Witherspoon championed this project from the beginning. Sonny Mehta gave me the great gift of his confidence. Mary Mount edited the novel from a European perspective. My copy editor, Kate Norris, went far beyond the call of duty. Leslie Levine responded with calm grace to every query.

  M
ichael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman were dazzlingly generous readers, editors, and friends. Brian Seibert lent me his sharp editorial eye, guidance on matters of dance, and courage when my own flagged. Daniel Orringer was a tireless source of medical detail, and Amy Orringer was an excellent travel partner and a fearless, nonjudgmental early reader. Carl and Linda Orringer gave their love, support, and unwavering belief in this project. Tom Tibor sent his meticulously researched writings about our family's experience. Judy Brodt shared her memories and her knowledge of Jewish observance.

  Tibor Schenk described his wartime experiences at Bor and led me to Munkaszolgalat websites. Christa Parravani walked into a ruin with me to take photographs.

  Above all, this book owes its existence to my grandparents Andrew and Irene Tibor, and to my great uncle and aunt Alfred and Susan Tibor. Deepest gratitude for your patience, belief, and generosity. To my uncle Alfred, thank you for taking the time to answer my questions, narrate our family's stories, and read the draft so carefully. To my grandmother, Anyu, most profound thanks: you read and edited with a poet's artistry, a dressmaker's exactitude, and a mother's sensitivity. The insight you provided could have come from nowhere else.

  My husband, Ryan Harty, read this novel countless times, and offered his incomparably acute editorial insight, his deep understanding of character, and his flawless ear for language. At every stage he made me feel that finishing the book was possible and necessary. No words of thanks can ever be enough.

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Continuum International Publishing Group: The poem "D'Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige" from Les Epigrammes by Clement Marot (London: Athlone Press, 1970).

  Reprinted by permission of Continuum International Publishing Group.

  New Directions Publishing Corp., Hamish Hamilton, and Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co.: "It is," from Unrecounted by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hamburger, copyright (c) 2004 by The Estate of W. G. Sebald. Copyright (c) 2003 by Carl Hanser Verlag Muchen. Translation copyright (c) 2004 by Michael Hamburger.

  Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., Hamish Hamilton, and Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Julie Orringer is the author of the award-winning short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is the winner of The Paris Review's Discovery Prize and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Ryan Harty.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright (c) 2010 by Julie Orringer

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found at the end of the volume.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Orringer, Julie.

  The invisible bridge / Julie Orringer. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59371-9

  1. Architecture students--Fiction. 2. Jews--Hungary--Fiction. 3. Brothers--Fiction.

  4. Jews--Persecutions--Fiction. 5. World War, 1939-1945--Europe--Fiction.

  6. Budapest (Hungary)--Fiction. 7. Paris (France)--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3615.R59168 2010

  813'.6--dc22 2009046498

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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