The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
They weren't allowed to speak to each other, or to venture outside, not even for a piss; they had to use a barrel for that. The warehouse door was locked, the building guarded by soldiers. In the morning they were put back on the train and sent east again.
That was the third day of travel. He was supposed to have embarked for Palestine the next morning. What would Klara be doing now? He knew it was futile to hope she would have gone on without him. What would she have thought two nights before, when the hour grew later and later and he hadn't come home? He imagined her bending over the valises, packing the baby's things, checking the clock on the dresser; he imagined her mild worry when the usual hour of his return had passed--had he stopped to have a last drink in Budapest with Mendel, or a last stroll through the familiar streets? The dinner she'd made would have grown cold in the kitchen. She would have put Tamas to bed, her worry shading into fear as eight o'clock became nine, and nine became ten.
What did she imagine had happened to him? Did she think he'd been thrown in jail or killed? Had the work-service administration told her anything, even now? In all probability she still didn't know. And what about Varsadi's threat? Would he be content when his men found the originals of The Crooked Rail at Eppler's offices, or would he insist that the apartment be searched too?
There was constant speculation on the train about where they were going and what awaited them at the end of the journey. The prevailing opinion was that there had been some mistake about the company's transfer. They were supposed to have been sent northwest to Esztergom at the end of the month, to work at another rail yard. The orders must have gotten confused. The mix-up would soon be discovered, and they would be put on a westbound train. But that didn't explain why soldiers had been sent to Szentendre Yard to load the men onto the trains, nor why they'd been shipped off with such haste.
The Ivory Tower, the former professor of history, offered another theory: He believed they were being sent east because they had all been witness to a crime, the slow and systematic diversion of millions of pengos' worth of goods into the black market. The government had begun a campaign to rout out military embezzlement, the Ivory Tower said. The stealing of goods intended for use on the battlefront was considered an act of treason punishable by death. A panic had spread among the labor service company commanders, who were the worst offenders of all. The Jewish labor servicemen could not be trusted to vouch for the innocence of officers who had abused them daily; instead they had to be shunted away out of sight, perhaps even to the Eastern Front.
Jozsef was terrified. Andras could see it. He hardly spoke. He kept to himself, gingerly touching his face where Varsadi had struck him. He never slept, not that Andras saw; he sat up all night sorting and rearranging the few items in his pack. He wouldn't crack a joke. He wouldn't eat the Munkaszolgalat food, preferring instead to pick at a crust of challah left over from the last lunch he'd brought to Szentendre. He refused at first to use the communal toilet can in the corner of the train; when necessity forced him to use it at last, he returned looking as though he'd been beaten.
Day became night again and the train went on. There was no stop for food or water. There was no respite from the heat. The men couldn't lie down; there wasn't room.
They could take turns sitting on the floor of the boxcar or raising their faces to the window. There was some relief in those moments when they could breathe fresh air. But by the fourth day there was no way to ignore the deepening stink nor the clawing thirst that had come upon them, and Andras began to wonder if the true purpose of the trip was to keep them on the train until they died of thirst. In the haze of his dehydration, he came to understand that it was all his fault that they were imprisoned on this eastbound train.
The Crooked Rail, however tongue-in-cheek, had in fact documented Szentendre's involvement in the black market; it had made the situation known to any labor serviceman too blind or naive to see it on his own, and might well have spread word of the operation beyond Szentendre. Klara had been right; he'd taken an absurd and unnecessary risk. The paper might have been a slender tree in a forest of incriminating evidence, but there it was nonetheless. Varsadi considered it important enough to have called a private conference with Andras and Mendel, important enough to have threatened them with a gun. If fifty copies of the paper hadn't made their way among the men each week, and perhaps out into the city, would Varsadi have been transformed from a tippling laxard into a man willing to send an entire company to the front just to save his own skin?
That afternoon, Andras stood at the window as they climbed through a rainstorm into a region of rock-strewn hills. A massive black shape emerged from behind a curtain of fog: the ruin of a medieval fortress, a jagged-toothed castle thrusting its black donjon into the sky. Andras prodded Mendel's shoulder and made him look. His own chest constricted with the sensation that he had dreamed this moment long ago. Everything about it seemed familiar: the sound of the wheels on the tracks, the filtered darkness of the boxcar, the stink of men packed close together, the chewed-off black shape of the fortress. A metallic taste came into his mouth, and his skin prickled with a feeling akin to shame. How had he let himself believe that he and Klara and Tamas, Tibor and Ilana and Adam, would be hidden in the hold of a Danube barge by now, making their way toward Romania, where they would board a boat that would take them to Palestine? How had he let himself believe they would safely cross a submarine-laced sea, that they would reach Haifa unscathed and start a new life in one of the settlements, that they would bring their parents over, that he himself would help to assemble the bones of a Jewish homeland? He had even let himself believe that Matyas would return from the work service alive and unhurt and join them in Palestine. But the castle on the hilltop, the fog, this train: Somehow he'd known it was coming all along. Somehow he'd known they would never leave Budapest together, that they would never make it out of Hungary and across the Mediterranean. He wondered if Klara had known too. If she had, how had they allowed each other to persist in their mutual delusion?
For years now, he understood at last, he'd had to cultivate the habit of blind hope.
It had become as natural to him as breathing. It had taken him from Konyar to Budapest to Paris, from the lonely chill of his room on the rue des Ecoles to the close heat of the rue de Sevigne, from the despair of Carpathian winter to Forget-Me-Not Street in the Erzsebetvaros. It was the inevitable by-product of love, the clear and potent distillate of fatherhood. It had prevented him from thinking too long or too hard about what might have happened to Polaner, to Ben Yakov, to his own younger brother. It had kept him from dwelling upon the possible consequences of publishing a paper like The Crooked Rail. It had stopped him from imagining himself shipped east into the mouth of the battle.
But here he was, and here was Mendel Horovitz, watching the castle disappear into the fog.
The train went on and on, always climbing, moving slowly into thinner, drier air.
The brutal heat began to fall away, and a scent of fir trees edged through the small high window. The men were silent, parched, faint with hunger and lack of sleep. They took turns sitting and standing. They drifted between sleep and wakefulness, their legs swaying with the motion of the train, their feet numb with the vibration of the wheels on the endless tracks. When the train stopped at a station on the fifth day, Andras could think only of how good it would feel to stretch himself out on the ground and sleep. From outside came the rattle of the door being unchained and drawn aside; a wave of fresh air moved through the stinking car, and the men pushed out onto the platform. Through the fog of his exhaustion, Andras read the station sign. TYPKA. A click at the front of the palate, a pursing of the lips around ka, the Hungarian diminutive. A shock of relief went through him: They weren't on the Eastern Front after all. They were still within their own borders.
TYPKA. He didn't realize he'd said it aloud until the Ivory Tower, standing next to him, shook his head and corrected him. "Turka," he said. "It's written in Cyrillic."
The camp where they were supposed to stay had been bombed a week earlier. A hundred and seventy men had been killed, the barracks leveled. The remaining men had had to dig vast graves to bury their comrades; the turned dirt had slumped into the pits with that week's rain. That labor company had left nothing behind but the bones of their dead--no sign or tool or scrap of comfort for the men of the 79/6th. Andras and the others camped in the mud of the assembly ground, and the next day they were installed in the main house and outbuildings of an empty Jewish orphanage half a kilometer away.
The place was built of Soviet cinderblock, its whitewash greened with mildew.
Everything inside the main house had been intended for the use of children. The bunks were absurdly short. The only way to lie on them was to curl one's knees to one's chest.
The sinks had running water, which was nothing less than a miracle, but they were built so low that it was necessary almost to kneel in order to wash one's face. The mess hall was furnished with tiny benches and low tables; the hallways were still marked with the children's heel-scuffs and muddy footprints. There was no other sign of them in the place.
Every shred of clothing, every shoe and book and spoon, had been removed as though the children had never existed.
Their new commander was a beefy-looking black-haired Magyar whose face was bisected by a spectacular keloid scar. The scar ran in an arc from the middle of his forehead to the tip of his chin, obliterating his right eyelid, skirting his nose by a millimeter, splitting his lips into four unequal parts. The lidless right eye gave his features a cast of perpetual surprise and horror, as if the initial shock of the wound had never left him. His name was Kozma. He came from Gyor. He had a gray wolfhound whom he alternately kicked and petted, and a lieutenant named Horvath whom he treated in the same manner. On their first morning at the orphanage, Kozma assembled the company in the yard and marched them five kilometers down the road, double-time, to a wet field where grass had grown unevenly over a long filled-in trench. This was where the children of the orphanage had been lined up and shot, their new commander told them, and this was where they, too, would be shot when their usefulness to the Hungarian Army had been exhausted. Their dog tags might return home, but they never would; they were filthier than pigs, lower than worms, already as good as dead. For now, though, their company would join the five hundred work servicemen who were rebuilding the road between Turka and Stryj. The old road flooded every time the Stryj River topped its banks. The new road would be laid on higher ground. Minefields posed a minor obstacle to the operation; on occasion, servicemen must clear the fields in order to allow the road to pass through. They were to finish the road by the time the snows came. Then they would be responsible for keeping it clear. The records-master, Orban, would see to their pay books. Tolnay, the medical officer, would treat them if they fell ill. But shirkers would not be tolerated. Tolnay was under strict orders to do everything in his power to keep the men from missing work. They were to obey the guards and officers in all matters; troublemakers would be punished, deserters shot.
When he'd concluded his speech, Kozma clicked his heels, swiveled the mass of his body with surprising speed, and stepped aside to let his lieutenant address the company. Lieutenant Horvath seemed a kind of collapsible model, his frame and features accordioned into a slimmer version of an ordinary man. He balanced a pair of spectacles on his nose and drew a memo from his breast pocket. There would be no electric light after dark, he told them in his thin monotone, no letter-writing, no canteen shop where they might replenish their supplies, no replacement uniforms if their uniforms got worn out or torn, no forming of groups, no fraternizing with guards, no pocketknives, no smoking, no hoarding of valuables, no shopping at stores in town or trading with the local peasantry. Their families would soon be informed of their transfer, but there was to be no postal communication between the 79/6th and the outside world--no packages, no letters, no telegrams. For safety's sake they must wear their armbands at all times. Without the proper identification, a person might be mistaken for the enemy and shot.
Horvath shouted them into five columns and marched them into the road again; they were to depart for their work site at once. The road was wet with deep sucking mud.
As the light began to rise, Andras saw that they were in a broad river valley that stretched between foothills dense with evergreens. In the distance rose the jagged gray peaks of the Carpathians. Clouds lay on the hillsides, bleeding fog into the valley. The rain-swollen Stryj rushed past between steep brown banks. Before long, Andras could feel the upward slope of the road in his back and thighs. The list of prohibitions kept spooling itself through his head: no electric light after dark, no letter-writing, no postal communication.
No way to get word to Klara. No way to learn what had happened to her, or to Tibor and Ilana and Adam, or to Matyas, if news of Matyas ever came. During his other periods of service, it had been Klara's letters that had kept him from despairing; the need to write I am well that had kept him, relatively speaking, well. How could he bear not to communicate, particularly after what had happened? He would have to find a way to send word to her, whatever the consequences. He'd bribe someone, sign promissory notes if he had to. He would write letters and his letters would find her. In the midst of the vast uncertainty that surrounded him, he knew that much.
It was ten kilometers to the work site; there, they were issued picks and shovels and divided into twenty teams of six. Each team had two wheelbarrow men and four shovelers. They could see hundreds of these teams shoveling dirt and carting it away, leveling the roadbed for the laying of gravel and asphalt. A line of leveled road stretched back toward Turka; a trail of red surveyors' markers pricked the green infinity between the work site and Skhidnytsya. Overseers snaked among the groups, slicing at the labor servicemen's backs and legs with narrow wooden rods.
They worked for five hours without pause. At noon they were given ten decagrams of a bread so gritty it must have been baked with sawdust, and a ladleful of watery turnip soup. Then they worked until nightfall and marched home in the dark. At the orphanage the company cook gave them each a cupful of onion broth. They were lined up in the courtyard and made to stand at attention for three hours before Kozma sent them to bed in their child-sized bunks. And that was to be the structure of their new lives.
Andras had a top bunk near a window, and Mendel had the bunk beside him, above the Ivory Tower. Jozsef occupied the bunk below Andras. Their first week at the orphanage Andras could hear Jozsef turning and shifting for hours on the hard wooden slats. Every time he turned, he shook Andras from the edge of sleep. By the fifth night Andras felt inclined to strangle him. All he wanted was to sleep so he wouldn't have to think about where he was, and why. But Jozsef wouldn't allow it. He rolled and shifted, rolled and shifted, for hours and hours.
"Stop it!" Andras hissed. "Go to sleep."
"Go to hell," Jozsef whispered.
"You go to hell."
"I'm in hell already," Jozsef said. "I'm going to die here. I know it."
"Something will kill us all, eventually," Mendel offered from the neighboring bunk.
"I've got a weak constitution and a short temper," Jozsef said. "I make bad decisions. I'm liable to talk back to someone with a gun."
"You've been in the work service for two months now," Andras said. "You haven't died yet."
"This isn't Szentendre," Jozsef said.
"Think of it as Szentendre with worse food and an uglier commander."
"For God's sake, Levi, aren't you listening? I need help."
"Keep it down!" someone said.
Andras climbed down from his bunk and sat at the edge of Jozsef's. He found Jozsef's eyes in the dark. "What is it?" he whispered. "What do you want?"
"I don't want to die before I'm thirty," Jozsef whispered back, his voice breaking like a boy's. He ran a hand under his nose. "I'm unprepared for this. I've done nothing these p
"Yes, you can. You're young and healthy. You'll get through it."
They sat silent for a long moment, listening to the breathing of the men around them. The sound of fifty men breathing in their sleep: It was like the string section of an orchestra playing on stringless violins and violas and cellos, an endless shushing of horsehair on wood. Every now and then a woodwind sneeze or a brassy cough would break the stream of breathing, but the stringless music continued, a constant sighing in the dark.