The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

  "What we need, you and I," he concluded, as he hung his hard hat in the foremen's locker room, "is a nice cold glass of lager."

  "I'd be a fool to argue," Andras said, and they set off together toward his father's favorite beer hall, a cavelike establishment not far from Rozsa utca, with taxidermied wolves' heads and deer antlers hanging on the walls and a giant old-fashioned barrel of beer on a wooden stand. At the tables, men smoked Fox cigarettes and argued about the fate of Europe. The bartender was an enormous mustachioed man who looked as though he subsisted on fried doughnuts and beer.

  "How's the lager today, Rudolf?" his father asked.

  Rudolf gave him a small-toothed smile. "Gets you drunk," he said.

  It seemed to be a routine of theirs. The bartender filled two glasses and poured himself a shot of whiskey, and they toasted each other's health.

  "Who's this skinny lad?" Rudolf asked.

  "My middle boy, the architect."

  "Architect, eh?" Rudolf raised an eyebrow. "Build anything around here?"

  "Not yet," Andras said.

  "Army

  service?"

  "Munkaszolgalat."

  "That who's starving you?"

  "Yes,

  sir."

  "I was a huszar in the Great War, like your father. On the Serbian front. Nearly lost a leg at Varazdin. But the labor service, now, that's a different story. Digging around in the muck all day, no excitement, no chance for glory, and a starvation diet on top of it." He shook his head. "That's no job for a smart boy like you. How much longer have you got?"

  "Six months," Andras said.

  "Six months! That's not so long. And good weather all the way. You'll do fine.

  But have another round on me, just in case. Bottoms up. May we all cheat death a thousand times!"

  They drank. Then Andras and his father retreated to their own table in a dark corner of the room, beneath a wolf head frozen in a howl. The head gave Andras a chill to the base of his spine. That winter in Transylvania he'd heard wolves howling at night, and had imagined their yellow teeth and silvered fur. There had been times when he'd felt so desperate he'd wanted to give himself up to them. As if to remind himself that he was home on furlough, he reached into his pocket and touched his father's watch; he'd left it with Klara when he'd gone to the Munkaszolgalat. Now he took it out to show his father.

  "It's a good watch," Bela said, turning it over in his fingers. "A great watch."

  "In Paris," Andras said, "whenever I was in a bad spot, I used to take it out and think about what you might do."

  His father gave him a rueful smile. "I'll bet you didn't always do what I would have done."

  "Not always," Andras said.

  "You're a good boy," his father said. "A thoughtful boy. You're always putting on a brave face in your letters from the Musz, to keep your mother's spirits up. But I know it's much worse than you let on. Look at you. They've half killed you."

  "It's not so bad," Andras said, feeling as he said it that it was true. It was just work, after all; he'd worked all his life. "We've been fed," he said. "They give us clothes and boots. We have a roof over our heads."

  "But you've had to leave school. I think about that every day."

  "I'll go back," he said.

  "To where? France doesn't exist anymore, not as a place for Jews. And this country ..." He shook his head in dismay and disgust. "But you'll find a way to finish.

  You've got to. I don't want to see you abandoning your studies."

  Andras understood what he was thinking. "You didn't abandon your studies," he said. "You left Prague because you had to."

  "But I didn't go back, did I?"

  "You didn't have much of a choice." He couldn't see any point in continuing the line of conversation; he was powerless to do anything about school now, and his father knew it as well as he did. The thought that it had been almost two years since he'd been at the Ecole Speciale made him feel pressed under a great and immovable weight. He looked up at a cluster of men who were going over the sports page in the Pesti Hirlap, arguing over which wrestler would win a tournament at the National Sports Club that night. He had never heard any of the wrestlers' names before.

  "It's good to see Klara, I'm sure," his father said. "It's hard to be away from your wife for so long. She's a nice girl, your Klara." But there was an echo of the look Andras had seen on his mother's face earlier, a shadow of hesitation, of reserve.

  "I wish you'd written to tell her you were moving," Andras said. "She would have come out to help you."

  "Your mother's kitchen girl helped. She was glad to have the extra work."

  "Klara's our family, Apa."

  His father pushed his lips out and shrugged. "Why should we trouble her with our problems?"

  Andras wasn't going to say what had occurred to him as his father had narrated their story: that he wished Klara might have been the one to negotiate the sale of the lumberyard, that he was certain she would have insisted on a better price and gotten it.

  But such a negotiation, which might have taken place in Paris without raising the slightest notice, would have been unthinkable in Konyar; here on the Hajdu plains, women did not haggle over real estate with men. "Klara's no stranger to hard work,"

  Andras said. "She's had to support herself since she was sixteen. And in any case, she thinks of you and Anya as her own parents."

  "Now that's a quaint notion," Bela said, and shook his head. "Don't forget, my boy, that we celebrated your wedding at her mother's house. I've met Mrs. Hasz. I've met Klara's brother. I don't think Klara could ever mistake us for her own family."

  "That's not what I mean. You're pretending not to understand me."

  "In Paris, maybe you and Klara were just two Hungarians keeping each other company," Bela said. "Here at home, things are different. Look around you. The rich don't sit down with the poor."

  "She's

  not

  the rich, Apa. She's my wife."

  "Her family bought out that nephew of hers. He didn't have to break his back in the work service. But they didn't do the same for you."

  "I told her brother I wouldn't consider it."

  "And he didn't argue, did he?"

  Andras felt the back of his neck grow warm; a flash of anger moved through him.

  "It's not fair of you to hold that against Klara," he said.

  "What's unfair is that some should have to work while others don't."

  "I didn't come here to argue with you."

  "Let's not argue, then."

  But it was too late. Andras was furious. He didn't want to be in his father's presence a moment longer. He put money on the table for the beer, but his father pushed it away.

  "I'm going for a walk," Andras said, getting to his feet. "I need some air."

  "Well, let your old father walk with you."

  He couldn't conceive of a way to say no. His father followed him out of the bar and they walked together in the blue light of evening. All along the avenue, yellow streetlamps had come on to illuminate the buildings with their flaking plaster and faded paint. He didn't think about where he was walking; he wished he could walk faster, lose his father in the dusk, but the fact was that he was exhausted, anemic, and in need of sleep. He pressed onward past the Aranybika Hotel, an aging dowager in white wooden lace; he walked past the double towers of the Lutheran church with its stolid spires. He kept walking, head down, all the way to the park across the street from the Deri Museum, a squat Baroque-style building clad in yellow stucco. The April evening, soft at the edges, reminded him of a thousand evenings he'd spent here as a schoolboy, with friends or alone, worrying the edges of his adolescent problems like the pages of favorite books.

  In those days he could always console himself with thoughts of home, of that patch of land in Konyar with its orchard and barn and lumberyard and millpond. Now his home in Konyar would never be his home again. His past, his earliest childhood, had been stolen from him. And his future, the life he ha
d imagined when he was a student here, had been stolen too. He sat on a bench and bent over his knees, his head in his hands; the hurt and dislocation he'd suffered for eighteen months seemed to come over him all at once, and he found himself choking out hoarse sobs into the night.

  Lucky Bela stared at this son of his, this boy whose troubles had always been closest to his own heart. He himself had never been subject to fits of weeping, nor had he encouraged them in his sons. He'd taught them to turn their hurt into work. That was what had saved his own life, after all. He hadn't raised his sons with much physical affection; that had been their mother's domain, not his. But as he watched his boy, this sick and beaten-down young man, sobbing jaggedly into his knees, he knew what he had to do: He sat down beside Andras on the bench and put his arms around him. His love had always seemed to mean something particular to this boy. He hoped it would mean something still.

  They stayed in Debrecen for a week. His mother fed him and tended his ravaged feet and made hot baths for him in the kitchen; she laughed at Mendel's stories about their mates in the work service, and cleaned the house for Passover with Klara. The new kitchen maid, an aging spinster named Marika, developed a fierce attachment to Mendel, whom she claimed was the spitting image of her brother who'd been killed in the Great War. She left him surreptitious gifts of woolen socks and underclothes, which must have cost a good portion of her wages. When he protested that the gifts were too fine, she pretended to know nothing about them. To Andras the dull familiarity of Debrecen was a kind of relief. He was glad to walk with his friend and his wife through the old neighborhoods, to buy them conical doughnuts at the same doughnut shop where he'd spent his pennies as a child, to show Klara the Jewish Gimnazium and the outdoor skating rink on Piac utca. His body grew stronger, his spongy gums firm again. The patches of old blood beneath his skin began to fade.

  He'd been painfully shy with Klara those first few days. He couldn't stand to have her see his body in its weakened state, and he doubted he would be equal to the demands of lovemaking. But he was a twenty-five-year-old man, and she was the woman he loved; it wasn't long before he moved toward her in the night, on the thin mattress they shared in the tiny extra room his mother used for sewing. All around them were garments his mother was mending or making to give to Andras or to send to his brothers in their work-service companies. The room was redolent of laundered cotton and the scorched sweetness of ironing. In that bower, in their second marriage bed, he reached for her and she came into his arms. He could scarcely believe that her physical being still existed, that he was allowed to revisit the parts of her he'd carried in his mind like talismans those eighteen months: her small high breasts, the silvery-white scar on her belly, the twin peaks of her hips. As they made love she kept her eyes open and steady on his. He couldn't read their color in the faint light that filtered through the covered window, but he could see the sharp intensity he recognized and loved. At times they seemed to struggle like old foes; part of him wanted almost to punish her for the longing she had made him feel. She seemed to understand, and met his anger with her own. When he collapsed against her at last, his heart beating against her chest, he knew they would find their way back across the distance that their long separation had opened between them.

  By the end of their week in Debrecen, a subtle change had occurred between Andras's mother and Klara. Knowing looks passed between them during meals; his mother insisted upon having Klara along when she went to the market, and she had asked her to make the matzo balls for their Passover seder. The matzo balls were the glory of the meal, more highly anticipated even than the fried cutlets of chicken or the potato kugel or the gefilte fish she always made from a live carp, which in Konyar had lived in a large tin tub of water in the summer kitchen, but which in Debrecen was forced to reside in the courtyard, on public display. (Two children, a girl and her brother, had befriended the fish, feeding it bits of bread when they got home from school; when it disappeared to become the second course of the seder, Andras told them he'd taken it to the city park and set it free, which earned him their enmity forever--though he insisted that it was what the carp had wanted, its instructions whispered to him in Carpathian, a language he claimed to have learned in the Munkaszolgalat.) His mother's matzo-ball recipe was written in a spidery lace of black ink upon a holy-looking piece of what could only have been parchment. It had been the property of Flora's great-grandmother Rifka, and it had been given to Flora on her wedding day in a small silver box tooled with the Yiddish word Knaidlach.

  One afternoon, when he came in from a walk with Mendel, he found his mother and Klara in the kitchen together, the silver box open on the table, the precious recipe in Klara's hands. Her hair was tied back in a kerchief, and she wore an apron embroidered with strawberries; her skin was bright with the heat of the kitchen. She squinted at the spidery script and then at the ingredients Andras's mother had laid out on the table.

  "But how much of everything?" she asked Flora. "Where are the measures?"

  "Don't worry about that," Andras' mother said. "Just do it by feel."

  Klara gave Andras a panicked smile.

  "Can I help?" Andras asked.

  "Yes, darling boy," Flora said. "Get your father from work. If I know him, he'll have forgotten he's supposed to come home early."

  "All right," Andras said. "But first I'd like a word with my wife." He took the recipe from her and laid it with care in the silver box; then he grabbed Klara's hand and pulled her into the little sewing room. He closed the door. Klara put her hands over her face and laughed.

  "Oh, God!" she said. "I can't make these matzo balls."

  "You

  could

  just

  surrender, you know."

  "What a recipe, that recipe! It might as well be written in secret code!"

  "Maybe it's magic. Maybe the quantities don't matter."

  "If only Mrs. Apfel were here. Or Elisabet." A wash of grief darkened her features, as it did every time she'd mentioned Elisabet's name that week. Her expectations had come to pass: The parents who lived on an estate in Connecticut had wanted nothing to do with Elisabet, and had cut off their son entirely. Undaunted, Paul and Elisabet had taken an apartment in Manhattan and had gone to work--Paul as a graphic artist, Elisabet as a baker's apprentice. Elisabet had excelled at the job, and had been promoted to assistant pastry chef; the fact that she was French gave her a certain cachet, and she had written a few months ago to say that a cake she'd decorated had served as the centerpiece for a grand wedding in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The mothers of wealthy young ladies had begun to come to her with requests. But now there was a child on the way. That piece of news had arrived in the most recent letter, just a few weeks earlier.

  "Klara," he said, and touched her hand. "Elisabet will be all right, you know."

  She sighed. "It's been a comfort to be here," she said. "To be with you. And to spend time with your mother. She loves her children like I love that girl."

  "You have to tell me what you did," he said. "You've bewitched her."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "My mother's fallen in love with you, that's what."

  Klara leaned against the wall and crossed her slender ankles. "I took her into my confidence," she said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I told her the truth. Everything. I wanted her to know what happened when I was a girl, and how I've lived since then. I was sure it would make a difference."

  "And it has."

  "Yes."

  "But now you've got to make matzo balls."

  "I think it's a kind of final test," Klara said, and smiled.

  "I hope you pass," he said.

  "You don't seem confident."

  "Of course I'm confident."

  "Go get your father," she said, and pushed him toward the door.

  By the time he and Mendel returned with Lucky Bela, there were matzo balls boiling in a pot on the stove. The gefilte fish was finished, the
table laid with a white cloth, the plates and silverware gleaming in the light of two white tapers. At the center of the table was a silver seder plate, the one they'd used every year since Andras could remember, with greens and bitter herbs, salt water and charoset, egg and shank bone laid out in its six silver cups.

  Lucky Bela stood beside his chair at the head of the table, silent with the news he'd received just before the boys had met him at work. In the foremen's office he'd heard it come in on the radio: Horthy had decided to let Hitler invade Yugoslavia from Hungarian soil--Yugoslavia, with whom Hungary had signed an agreement of peace and friendship a year before. Nazi troops had gathered at Barcs and swarmed across the Drava River while Luftwaffe bombers decimated Belgrade. Bela knew what it was all about: Hitler was punishing the country for the military coup and the popular uprising that had followed Yugoslavia's entry into the Tripartite Pact. Not a week earlier, Germany had pledged to guarantee the borders of Yugoslavia for a thousand years; now Hitler had set his armies against it. The invasion had begun that afternoon. Hungarian troops would be sent to Belgrade later that week to support the German Army. It would be Hungary's first military action in the European conflict. It seemed clear to Bela that this was only the beginning, that Hungary could not avoid being drawn further into the war. Thousands of boys would lose their lives. His children would be sent to work on the front lines. He had listened to the news and let it sink into his bones, but when Andras and Mendel had arrived he'd kept it from them. Nor would he say anything now, in the presence of this sacred-looking table. He couldn't bear the thought that the news might ruin what his wife and his son's wife had created. He led the seder as usual, feeling the absence of his youngest and eldest sons as a sharp constriction in his chest. He retold the story of the exodus and let Mendel recite the Four Questions. He managed to eat the familiar meal, with the boiled egg on greens and the fresh gefilte fish and the matzo balls in their gold broth. He sang the blessings afterward as he always did, and was grateful for the fourth ceremonial glass of wine. When he opened the door at the end of the seder to give the prophet Elijah his welcome, he saw open doors all around the courtyard. It was a comfort to know he was surrounded by other Jews. But he couldn't keep the news at bay forever. From the courtyard came the gritty sound of the national news station; someone downstairs had put a radio in the window so others could hear. A man was making a speech in a grave aristocratic voice: It was Miklos Horthy, their regent, mobilizing the country toward its glorious destiny within the new Europe. Bela could see the understanding come over his wife's face, then his son's. Hungary was involved now, irrevocably so. As they crowded out onto the balcony to listen to the broadcast, Bela pushed the door open a few more centimeters. Eliahu ha Navi, he sang, under his breath.