The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
As it happened, it was his younger brother--the one whose function had always been to cause trouble, rather than to alleviate it--who materialized in Budapest during Andras's furlough. Matyas rolled into Nyugati Station with the rest of his company, which had been posted nearby while it awaited a transfer, and jumped off the train to enjoy a furlough of his own making. His company was directed by a lax young officer who allowed his men to buy an occasional exemption from work. Matyas, who had hoarded money during his window-trimming days, had bought a few days off to see a shopgirl he'd met on one of his jobs. He had no idea that Andras was home on furlough, too, and so it was purely by accident that, on Monday afternoon, Matyas jumped onto the back of a streetcar and found himself face-to-face with his brother. He was so surprised that he would have fallen off again if Andras hadn't grabbed his arm and held him.
"What are you doing here?" Matyas cried. "You're supposed to be slaving at a mine."
"And you're supposed to be--doing what?"
"Building bridges. But not today! Today I'm going to see a girl named Serafina."
An elderly woman in a kerchief gave them a disapproving look, as if they ought to know better than to engage in such loud and animated conversation on a streetcar. But Andras pulled Matyas's face close to his own and said to the woman, "It's my brother, do you see? My brother!"
"You must have had donkeys for parents," the woman said.
"Pardon us, your ladyship," Matyas said. He tipped his hat and executed a perfect backflip from the side rail of the streetcar to the pavement, so swiftly that the woman gave a little scream. As the passengers watched in astonishment, he tapped out a soft-shoe rhythm against the cobblestones and then fleetfooted his way up onto the curb, scattering the pedestrians there; he turned a double spin, whipped off his hat, and bowed to a young woman in a blue twill coat. Everyone who'd seen him gave a cheer. Andras jumped down from the streetcar and waited until his brother had finished taking his curtain calls.
"Needless foolishness," Andras said, once the applause had died down.
"I must emblazon that on a flag and carry it everywhere."
"You might well. Then everyone would have some warning."
"Where are you going with a market bag full of potatoes?" Matyas asked.
"Home to my apartment, where my wife is waiting for me."
"Your apartment? What apartment?"
"Thirty-five
Nefelejcs
utca, third floor, apartment B."
"Since when do you live there? And for how long?"
"Since last night. And for another day and a half, until I have to go back to Banhida."
Matyas laughed. "Then I suppose I caught you by your shirttails."
"Or I caught you. Why don't you come for dinner?"
"I might be otherwise engaged."
"And what if this Serafina sees you for the glib young fool you are?"
"In that case I'll come over at once." Matyas kissed Andras on both cheeks and hopped aboard the next streetcar, which by that time had pulled up beside them.
For a few blocks, as Andras walked toward home, he felt inclined to tap-dance himself. Chance favored him at times; it had delivered the unexpected furlough, and now it had delivered Matyas. But not even that welcome surprise could divert his mind from its new channel of worry. The newspaper he'd bought that afternoon had delivered a sobering view of events in the east: Kiev had fallen to the Germans, and Hitler's armies lay within a hundred miles of Leningrad and Moscow. In a radio address earlier that week, the Fuhrer had proclaimed the imminent capitulation of the Soviet Union. Andras feared that the British, who had held out fiercely in the Mediterranean, would lose hope now; if their defenses crumbled, Hitler would rule all of Europe. He thought of Rosen at the Blue Dove three years earlier, declaring that Hitler wanted to make a Germany of the world. Not even Rosen could have predicted the degree to which that speculation would prove true. German territory had spread across the map of Europe like spilled ink. And the people of the conquered countries had been turned from their homes, deported to wastelands or clapped into ghettoes or sent to labor camps. He wanted to believe that Hungary might remain a refuge at the center of the firestorm; it was easier to believe such a thing here in Budapest, far from the heat and stink of Banhida Camp. But if Russia were to fall, no country in Europe would be safe, particularly not for Jews--certainly not Hungary, where the Arrow Cross had gained strength in every recent election. Into this baffling uncertainty, Andras and Klara's child would be born. He began to understand how his own parents must have felt when his mother had become pregnant with him during the Great War, though the situation had been different then: His father had been a Hungarian soldier, not a forced laborer, and there had been no crazed Fuhrer dreaming of a Jew-free Europe.
At home he found Klara and Ilana sitting at the kitchen table and laughing over some intimacy, Ilana's hands clasped in Klara's own. It was clear to him, even at first glance, that the connection between them had deepened in his absence; in her letters Klara had often mentioned how grateful she was for Ilana's companionship, and he'd been relieved to know that they lived just a few blocks from each other and crossed the distance often. If Klara had been Ilana's confidante and protector in Paris, now she seemed to have become something like an older sister. Soon after Ilana had arrived in Budapest, Klara had told him, they'd begun a ritual of going to the market together every Monday and Thursday morning. When Tibor had gone to the Munkaszolgalat, Klara had seen to it that Ilana wasn't lonely; they cooked together, spent evenings with Klara's records or Ilana's books, strolled the boulevards and parks on Sunday afternoons. That particular night, just before Andras had arrived, Ilana had delivered a piece of sweet and complicated news: She was pregnant. She repeated the news now in her tentative Hungarian. It had happened while Tibor was home on his last furlough. If all went well, the babies would be born two months apart. She'd written to Tibor and received a letter assuring her that he was well, that his labor company was far from the dangerous action farther east, that the summer weather had made everything more bearable, that her news had made him happier than he'd believed he could be.
But there was no happiness that fall of 1941 that wasn't complicated by worry.
Andras could see it in the narrow lines that had gathered on Ilana's brow. He knew what this pregnancy must mean to her after her miscarriage, and how terrified she would be for the baby's safety even if they weren't in the midst of a war. He would have embraced her if her observance hadn't forbidden it. As it was, he had to be content to congratulate her and express his fervent wish that all would go well. Then he told the two of them how he had run into Matyas on the streetcar.
"Well," Klara said. "It's a good thing I bought extra pastries for dessert. That young goat would eat us into starvation otherwise."
Matyas arrived just as Klara was setting out the pastries in the sitting room after dinner. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and plucked a cream-filled mille-feuille from the silver tray. For Ilana he had a deep bow and a flourish of his hat.
"Your romancing must have gone well," Andras said. "Your cheeks are on fire with lipstick."
"It's not lipstick," Matyas said. "It's the stain of breached innocence. Serafina is far too worldly for me. I'm still blushing from what she said when we parted."
"We won't ask what it was," Klara said.
"I wouldn't tell anyway," he said, and winked. He looked around him at the furnishings of the sitting room. "What a place," he said. "All of this just for the two of you!"
"For the three of us, soon," Klara said.
"Of course. I nearly forgot. Andras is going to be a papa."
"And so is Tibor," Ilana said.
"Good God!" Matyas said. "Is it true? Both of you?"
"It's true," Ilana said, and then pointed a teasing finger at him. "Now your anya and apa will want you to be married, too, just to complete the picture."
"Not a chance," Matyas said, with another wink. He laid down a quick comb
"We don't call that dancing where I come from," Klara said, and smiled.
"How about this, then?" Matyas got to his feet and executed a double-pirouette with his arms above his head. But at the end he lost his balance and had to catch himself on the mantel. He stood for a moment breathing hard, shaking his head as if to clear it of a gyrational ghost, and for the first time Andras noticed how exhausted and ravenous he looked. He took Matyas by the shoulder and led him to one of the striped ivory chairs.
"Sit here for a while," Andras said. "You'll feel better when you get up."
"Don't you like my dancing?"
"Not at the moment, brother."
Klara made a plate of pastries for Matyas, and Andras poured him a glass of slivovitz. For a while they all sat together and talked as though there were no such thing as war or worry or the work service. Andras kept the dessert plates and coffee cups filled.
Ilana blushed at the attention, protesting that it wasn't right to allow herself to be waited upon by her husband's brother. Andras thought he had never seen her look so beautiful.
Her skin, like Klara's, seemed lit from within. Her hair was hidden under the kerchief worn by observant married women, but the scarf she'd chosen was made of lilac-colored silk shot through with silver. When she laughed at Matyas's jokes, the black-brown depths of her eyes seemed to flare with intelligent light. It was astonishing to think that this was the same girl who had lain pale and terrified in a hospital bed in Paris, her lips whitening with pain as she woke from the anesthesia.
After they finished their coffee, Andras and Matyas went out for a walk together in the mild September night. From Nefelejcs utca it was only a few blocks to the city park, where gold floodlights illuminated the Vajdahunyad Castle. The paths were full of pedestrians even at that hour; in the shadowy recesses of the castle walls they could see men and women moving against each other in imperfect privacy. Matyas's high spirits had quieted now that the two of them were alone. He crossed his arms over his chest as if he were cold in the warm breeze. His time in the Munkaszolgalat seemed to have sharpened him somehow; the planes of his face had become harder and more distinct. His high forehead and prominent cheekbones, so much like their mother's, had begun to lend him a gravity that seemed at odds with his prankster wit.
"My brothers have beautiful wives," he said. "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous."
"Well, I'd be rather disappointed if you weren't."
"You're truly going to be a father?"
"So it seems."
He let out a low whistle. "Excited?"
"Terrified."
"Nonsense. You'll be wonderful. And Klara's been through it once before."
"Her child wasn't born during a war," Andras said.
"No, but she didn't have a husband then, either."
"She didn't seem so much the worse for it. She got work. She raised her daughter.
Elisabet might have been a more pleasant girl if she'd had a different sort of family--a brother or sister to play with, and a father to stop her from being so unkind to her mother.
But she turned out all right, after all. I'm not much use as a husband. So far I've been nothing but a weight around Klara's neck."
"You were drafted," Matyas said. "You had to serve. It's not as though you had any choice."
"I haven't finished my studies. I can't come home and start working as an architect."
"Then you'll go back to school."
"If I can get into school. And then there's the time and expense."
"What you need," Matyas said, "is some well-paid work that doesn't take all your time. Why not go into business with me?"
"What, as a tap dancer? Do you imagine us as a performing team? The Amazing Levi Brothers?"
"No, you dolt. We'll be a team of window-trimmers. The work will go twice as fast with two of us doing it. I'll be the stylist. You'll be my slave. We'll get double the clients."
"I don't know if I could take orders from you," Andras said. "You'd break my back."
"What'll you do for money, then? Sit on a street corner and make caricatures?"
"I've been thinking," Andras said. "My old friend Mendel Horovitz worked at the Budapest Evening Courier before he went into the labor service. He says they're always looking for layout artists and illustrators. And the pay's not bad."
"Akh. But then you'd just be someone else's slave."
"If I've got to be someone's slave, I might as well do it in a field where I've got experience."
"What
experience?"
"Well, there was my old job at Past and Future. And then there are the newspapers Mendel and I have been making, the ones I wrote you about. I would have brought you a copy if I'd known I was going to see you."
"I understand," Matyas said. "Window-trimming isn't fancy enough work for you.
Not after your Paris education." He was teasing, but his expression betrayed a flicker of pique. Andras remembered the fierce letters Matyas had written from Debrecen while Andras was in Paris--the ones in which Matyas had claimed his own share of an education. Then the war had begun, and Matyas had been stuck in Hungary, working first at window-trimming and then in the Munkaszolgalat. Andras was ashamed to realize that he did feel as if he should have moved beyond a job like window-trimming, which carried a flavor of commercial servitude. It was the wild luck of his last months in Paris that had made him feel that way, the kindness of his professors and his mentors that had led him to expect something different. But that was behind him now. He needed to earn money. In a few months he would be a father.
"Forgive me," Andras said. "I didn't mean to suggest your work wasn't an art. It's a higher art than newspaper illustration, that's for certain."
Matyas's look seemed to soften, and he put a hand on his brother's arm. "That's all right," he said. "I might think myself too fine for window-trimming, too, if Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret had been my drinking companions."
"We were never drinking companions," Andras said.
"Don't try to go in for humility now."
"Oh, all right. We were great friends. We drank together constantly." He fell silent, thinking of his real friends, the ones who were scattered across the Western Hemisphere now. Those men were his brothers too. But there hadn't been word from Ben Yakov after that conciliatory telegram, nor from Polaner since he'd joined the Foreign Legion. Andras wondered what had happened to the photograph that had been taken when he and Polaner had won the Prix du Amphitheatre. It seemed strange to think it might still exist somewhere, a record of a vanished life.
"You look grim, brother," Matyas said. "Do we need to get some wine into you?"
"It couldn't hurt," Andras said.
So they went to a cafe overlooking the artificial lake, the one that became a skating rink in winter, and they sat at a table outside and ordered Tokaji. The war had made wine expensive, but Matyas insisted upon the indulgence and further insisted upon paying, since he didn't have a wife or future child to support. He promised to let Andras pay the next time, once he'd landed a job at a newspaper, though of course neither of them knew when that might happen, or even when they might next be home together.
"Now, who's this Serafina?" Andras asked, looking at his brother through the amber lens of his glass of Tokaji. "And when will we meet her?"
"She's a seamstress at a dress shop on Vaci utca."
"And?"
"And, I met her when I was working on a window. She was wearing a white dress embroidered with cherries. I made her take it off so I could put it in the window display."
"You made her take her dress off?"
"Do you see why it might be an attractive job?"
"Did she go back to her sewing machine naked?"
"No. Sadly, the dressmaker had something else for her to put on."
"Now, that's a shame."
"Yes. I've felt the sting of it ever since. That's why I decided to pursue her. I wanted to see what I missed when she stepped behind the changing-room curtain."
"You must have seen enough to make it seem worth the pursuit."
"Plenty. She's what I like. Just a shade taller than me. Black hair cut into a neat little cap. And a mole on her cheek like a spot of brown ink."
"Well, I can't wait to make her acquaintance."
Again, the glint of mirth faded out of Matyas's eyes; the faint shadows beneath them seemed to deepen as he looked down into his glass of wine. "I'm going to follow my company tomorrow," he said. "We're off to the big party."
"What big party?"
"Belgorod, in Russia. The front lines."