The InvisibleBridge

by Julie Orringer

  On the twentieth of April, Tibor lost his position at the hospital. Andras and Polaner were dismissed from the Evening Courier and informed that they wouldn’t find work at any daily paper in town. József, employed informally and paid under the table, went on with his painting business, but his list of clients began to shrink. By the first week of May, signs had gone up in the windows of shops and restaurants, cafés and movie theaters and public baths, declaring that Jews were not welcome. Andras, coming home one afternoon from the park with Tamás, stopped short on the sidewalk across from their neighborhood bakery. In the window was a sign almost identical to the one he’d seen at the bakery in Stuttgart seven years earlier. But this sign was written in Hungarian, his own language, and this was his own street, the street where he lived with his wife and son. Struck faint, he sat down on the curb with Tamás and stared across the way into the lighted window of the shop. All looked ordinary there: the girl in her white cap, the glossy loaves and pastries in the case, the gold curlicues of the bakery’s name. Tamás pointed and said the name of the pastry he liked, mákos keksz. Andras had to tell him that there would be no mákos keksz that day. So much had become forbidden, and so quickly. Even being out on the streets was dangerous. There was a new five o’clock curfew for Jews; those who failed to comply could be arrested or shot. Andras pulled out his father’s pocket watch, as familiar now as if it were a part of his own body. Ten minutes to five. He got to his feet and picked up his son, and when he reached home, Klara met him at the door with his call-up notice in her hand.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE. Farewell

  THIS TIME they were together, Andras and József and Tibor; Polaner had been exempted, thanks to his false identity papers and medical-status documents. The labor battalions had been regrouped. Three hundred and sixty-five new companies had been added. Because Andras and József and Tibor lived in the same district, they had all been assigned to the 55/10th. Their send-off had been like a funeral at which the dead, the three young men, had been piled with goods to take into the next world. As much food as they could carry. Warm clothes. Woolen blankets. Vitamin pills and rolls of bandage. And in Tibor’s pack, drugs pilfered from the hospital where he had worked. Anticipating their call-up, he had felt no compunction about laying aside vials of antibiotic and morphine, packets of suture, sterile needles and scissors and clamps: a kit of tools he prayed he wouldn’t have to use.

  Klara had not been with them at the train station for their departure. Andras had said goodbye to her that morning at home, in their bedroom at Nefelejcs utca. The first nine weeks of her pregnancy had passed without event, but in the tenth she was seized with a violent nausea that began every morning at three o’clock and lasted almost until noon. That morning she’d been sick for hours; Andras had stayed with her as she bent over the toilet bowl and dry-heaved until her face streamed with tears. She begged him to go to bed, to get some sleep before he had to face the ordeal of his journey, but he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t have left her side for anything in the world. At six in the morning her strength broke. Shaking with exhaustion, she cried and cried until she lost her voice. It was intolerable, she whispered, impossible, that Andras could be here with her one day, intact and safe, and the next be taken away to the hell from which he’d come last spring. Given to her and taken away. Given and taken away. When so much of what she’d loved had been taken away. He couldn’t remember a time when she had stated her fear, her sense of desolation, so plainly. Even at their worst times in Paris, she had held something back; something had been hidden from him, some essential part of her being that she’d had to guard in order to survive the ordeals of her adolescence, her early motherhood, her solitary young womanhood. Since they’d been married, there had been the necessary holding back imposed by their circumstances. But now, in the vulnerability of her pregnancy, with Andras on the verge of departure and Hungary in the hands of the Nazis, she had lost the strength to defend her reserve.

  She cried and cried, beyond consolation, beyond caring whether anyone heard; as he rocked her in his arms he had the sense that he was watching her mourn him-that he had already died and was witnessing her grief. He stroked her damp hair and said her name over and over again, there on the bathroom floor, feeling, strangely, as if they were finally married, as if what had existed between them before had only been preparation for this deeper and more painful connection. He kissed her temple, her cheekbone, the wet margin of her ear. And then he wept, too, at the thought of leaving her alone to face what might come.

  At dawn, just before he had to dress, he took her to bed and slid in beside her. “I won’t do it,” he said. “They’ll have to drag me away from you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she tried to tell him. “My mother will be with me. And Ilana, and Elza. And Polaner.”

  “Tell my son his father loves him,” Andras said. “Tell him that every night.” He took his father’s pocket watch from the nightstand and pressed it into Klara’s palm. “I want him to have this, when it’s time.”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’ll give it to him yourself.” She folded it into his own hand. And then it was morning, and he had to go.

  Again the boxcars. Again the darkness and the pressure of men. Here was József beside him, inevitable; and Tibor, his brother, his scent as familiar as their childhood bed. This time they were headed, as if into the past, toward Debrecen. Andras knew exactly what was passing outside: the hills melting into flatlands, the fields, the farms. But now the fields, if they were worked, were worked by forced-labor companies; the farmers and their sons were all at war. The patient horses shied at the unfamiliar voices of their drivers. The dogs barked at the strangers, never growing accustomed to their scent. The women watched the workers with suspicion and kept their daughters inside. Maglód, Tápiogyörgy, Ujszász, those one-street towns whose train stations still bore geraniums in window boxes: They had been stripped of their Christian men of military age, and their Jewish men of labor-service age, and would soon be stripped of the rest of their Jewish inhabitants. Already the concentrations and deportations had begun-deportations, when Horthy had vowed never to deport. Döme Sztójay was prime minister now, and he was doing what the Germans had told him to do. Concentrate the Jews of the small towns in ghettoes in the larger towns. Count them carefully. Make lists. Tell them they were needed for a great labor project in the east; hold out the promise of resettlement, of a better life elsewhere. Instruct them each to pack a single suitcase. Bring them to the rail yard. Load them onto trains. The trains left daily for the west, returned empty, and were filled again; an unspeakable dread settled over those who remained and waited. The few, like Polaner, who had already been inside German camps and had lived to tell about them, knew there was to be no resettlement. They knew the purpose of those camps; they knew the product of the great labor project. They told their stories and were disbelieved.

  For Andras and Tibor and József, the four-hour trip to Debrecen took three days. The train stopped at the platforms of the little towns; in some places they could hear other boxcars being coupled to their own, more work servicemen being fed into the combustion engine of the war. No food or water except what they’d brought. No place to relieve themselves except the can at the back of the car. Long before they pulled into the station at Debrecen, Andras recognized the pattern of track-switching that characterized the approach. In the semidarkness, Tibor’s eyes met Andras’s and held them. Andras knew he was thinking of their parents, who had withstood so many departures, who had already lost one son and whose two remaining sons were now headed toward the fighting again. Two weeks earlier, Béla and Flóra had been locked into a ghetto that happened to contain their building on Simonffy utca. There had been no way, no time, to say goodbye. Now Andras and Tibor were at Debrecen Station, not fifteen minutes’ walk from that ghetto, if there had been any way to get off the train, and any way to walk through the city without being shot.

  The boxcar sat on its track in Debrecen all night. It
was too dark for Andras to read his father’s pocket watch; there was no way to determine how late it was, how many hours until morning. They couldn’t know whether they would leave that day or be forced to remain in the reeking dark while more cars were hitched to theirs, more men loaded aboard. They took turns sitting; they drowsed and woke. And then, in the stillest hour of the night, they heard footsteps on the gravel outside the car. Not the heavy tread of the guards, but tentative footsteps; then a quiet knocking on the side of the boxcar.

  “Fredi Paszternak?”

  “Geza Mohr?”

  “Semyon Kovács?”

  No one responded. Everyone was awake now, everyone stilled with fear. If these seekers were caught, they would be killed. Everyone knew the consequences.

  After a moment the footsteps moved on. More seekers approached. Rubin Gold? György Toronyi? The names came in a steady stream; soft excited voices could be heard from a nearby car, where someone had found who they were looking for. And then, in the next wave of seekers, Andras Lévi? Tibor Lévi?

  Andras and Tibor rushed to the side of the car and called to their parents in hushed voices: Anyu, Apu. The diminutive forms not used since childhood. Andras and Tibor made young again in their extremity, by the impossible closeness and untouchability of their mother, Flóra; their father, Béla. Inside the boxcar, men pushed aside to give them room, a measure of privacy in that packed enclosure.

  “Andi! Tibi!” Their mother’s voice, desperate with pain and relief.

  “But how did you get here?” Tibor asked.

  “Your father bribed a policeman,” their mother said. “We had an official escort.”

  “Are you all right, boys?” Their father’s voice again, asking a question whose answer was already known, and to which Andras and Tibor could only respond with a lie. “Do you know where they’re sending you?”

  They did not.

  There was little time to talk. Little time for Béla and Flóra to do what they had come to do. A package appeared at the bars of the single high window, looped to a metal hook with a length of brown twine. The package, too large to fit through the window bars, had to be lowered again and broken down into its components. Two woolen sweaters. Two scarves. Tight-wrapped packages of food. A packet of money: two thousand pengő. How had they saved it? How had they kept it hidden? And two pairs of sturdy boots, which had to be left behind; no way to pass them through the window.

  Then their father’s voice again, saying the prayer for travel.

  Flóra and Béla hurried through the darkened streets toward home, each carrying a pair of sturdy boots. Behind them, with a hand on their shoulders as though they were under arrest, was the bribed policeman, a former member of Béla’s chess club, who had arranged for them to slip out through a cellar that joined two buildings, one inside the ghetto, one out. Others had slipped out in the same manner and returned safely, though some had failed to return and had not been heard from again. They were entirely at the mercy of this policeman with whom Béla had shared a few chess matches, a few glasses of beer. But they had little fear of what might happen now, little fear of being turned over to a less sympathetic member of the Debrecen police; now that they had delivered the food, the sweaters, the money, had exchanged a few words with the boys, had given them their blessing, what else mattered? What a waste it would have been to be caught with the packages in hand, but they’d been lucky; the streets had been nearly empty when they’d left the ghetto. Béla’s intelligence sources, a rail-yard foreman of his long acquaintance and the bartender called Rudolf, had both proved reliable. The train was there, just where it was supposed to be, and the guards at the train yard engaged in a drinking party for which Rudolf had supplied the beer. Rudolf had remembered Andras from his visit to the beer hall, the evening when he had quarreled with his father over the choice of Klara. What a luxury it had been, Lucky Béla thought, to have had the time and inclination for a quarrel. He had admired his son’s defense of his choice of wife. In the end he had been right, too: Klara had been a good match for him-as good, it seemed, as Flóra had been for Béla. Lucky. Yes, he was lucky, even now. Flóra was there at his side, the policeman’s hand on her shoulder-his wife, the mother of his sons, willing to risk her life for them in the middle of the night, despite his protests; unwilling to allow him to go alone.

  At last the policeman delivered them to the courtyard that led to the cellar. With an antiquated and incongruous politeness, he held the door as they entered that tunnel back to their enclosed lives. Before long they had reached their own building and climbed the stairs to their apartment, where they undressed in the dark without a word. There would only be a few hours to sleep before they would rise to the circumscribed business of their day. In bed, Flóra pulled the coverlet to her chin and let out a sigh. There was nothing more they could say to each other, nothing more to do. Their boys, their babies. The little three, as they’d always called them. The little three adrift on the continent, like wooden boats. Flóra turned over and put her head on Lucky Béla’s chest, and he stroked the silver length of her hair.

  For another few weeks they would share this bed while the Jews of Hajdú County were massed in Debrecen. Then, on a late June morning, as the nasturtium vine opened its trumpets on the veranda and the white goats bleated in the courtyard, they would descend the stairs, each with a single suitcase, and walk with their neighbors through the ghetto gates, down the familiar city streets, all the way to the Serly Brickyards west of town, where they would be loaded onto a train almost identical to the one that had carried their sons to no one knew where. The train would roll west, through the stations with the window boxes full of geraniums; it would roll west through Budapest. Then it would roll north, and north, and farther north, until its doors opened at Auschwitz.

  The train carrying Andras and Tibor and József rolled east to the edge of the country. There, in a Carpatho-Ruthenian town whose name would change twice as it became part of Czechoslovakia again and then part of the Soviet Union, they were escorted by armed guards to a camp three kilometers from the Tisza River. Their task would be to load timber onto barges for transport through Hungary and on toward Austria. They were assigned to a windowless bunkhouse with five rows of three-tiered bunks; outside, along the edge of the building, was a line of open sinks where they could wash. That evening at dinnertime they drank a coffee that was not coffee, ate a soup that was not soup, and received ten decagrams of gritty bread, which Tibor made them save for the next day. It was the fifth of June, a mild night redolent of rain and new grass. The fighting had not yet reached the nearby border. They were permitted to sit outside after dinner; a man who’d brought a violin played Gypsy tunes while another man sang. Andras could not know-and none of them would learn, not for months-that later the same night, a fleet of Allied ships would reach the coast of Normandy, and thousands of troops would struggle ashore under a hail of gunfire. Even if they’d known, they wouldn’t have dared to hope that the Allied invasion of France might save a Hungarian labor company from the terrors of the German occupation, or keep their own bend of the Tisza from being bombed while they were loading the barges. Even if they’d known of the invasion, they would have known better than to attempt to determine one set of circumstances from another, to trace neat lines of causality between a beach at Viervillesur-Mer and a forced labor camp in Carpatho-Ruthenia. They knew their situation; they knew what to be grateful for. When Andras lay down that night on his wooden bunk, with Tibor on the tier above and József below, he thought only: Today at least we’re together. Today we are alive.

  CHAPTER FORTY. Nightmare

  IN THE END, what astonished him most was not the vastness of it all-that was impossible to take in, the hundreds of thousands of dead from Hungary alone, and the millions from all over Europe-but the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life was balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dus
t of breadcrumbs in a pocket. On the tenth of January, at the cold disordered dawn of 1945, Andras lay on the floor of a boxcar in a Hungarian quarantine camp a few kilometers from the Austrian border. The nearby town was Sopron, with its famous Goat Church. A vague childhood memory-an art-history lesson, a white-haired master with a moustache like the disembodied wings of a dove, an image of the carved stone chancel where Ferdinand III had been crowned King of Hungary. According to the legend, a goat had unearthed an ancient treasure on that site; the treasure had been buried again when the church was built, as a tribute to the Virgin Mary. And so, somewhere up the hill, beneath the church whose blackened spire was visible from where he lay, an ancient treasure moldered; and here in the quarantine camp, three thousand men were dying of typhus. Andras climbed into the swirling heights of a fever through which his thoughts proceeded in carnival costume. He remembered, vaguely, having been told that the quarantined men were supposed to consider themselves lucky. Those not infected had been shipped over the Austrian border to labor camps.

  Some facts he could grasp. He counted these certainties like marbles in a bag, each with its twist of blood- or sea-colored glass. Their bend of the Tisza had, in fact, been bombed. It had happened on an unseasonably warm night in late October, nearly five months after they’d arrived at the camp. He remembered crouching in the darkness with Tibor and József, the walls shuddering as shock waves rolled through the earth; only by an act of grace, it seemed, had their building remained intact. Thirty-three men had been crushed in another bunkhouse when it collapsed. Six bargemen and half a company of Hungarian soldiers, quartered that night on the riverbank, had all been killed. The 55/10th, in tatters, had fled west ahead of the advancing Soviet Army. For weeks their guards had shuffled them from one town to another, quartering them in peasants’ huts or barns or in the open fields, as the war rumbled and flared, always a few kilometers away. By that time Hungary had fallen into the hands of the Arrow Cross. Horthy had proved too difficult for Germany to control; under pressure from the Allies he had stopped the deportations of Jews, and on the eleventh of October he’d covertly negotiated a separate peace agreement with the Kremlin. When he announced the armistice a few days later, Hitler had forced him to abdicate and had exiled him to Germany with his family. The armistice was nullified. Ferenc Szálasi, the Arrow Cross leader, became prime minister. The news reached the labor servicemen in the form of new regulations: They were now to be treated not as forced laborers, but as prisoners of war.