The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
The next morning he fixed upon Budapest as his destination, in the hope of finding Andras there. The high-ranking inspector provided Polaner with the letters and documents necessary to obtain legal residency in Hungary; he even got him a doctor's certificate declaring Polaner unfit for military service due to a chronic weakness of the lungs. He gave Polaner twenty thousand reichsmarks and put him into a private compartment on a train. When Polaner arrived, he made his way to the grand synagogue on Dohany utca, where he found an ancient secretary who spoke Yiddish; he communicated that he was looking for Andras Levi, and the secretary had directed him to the Budapest Izraelita Hitkozseg, which provided him with Andras's address on Nefelejcs utca. Klara had taken him in, and here he'd remained ever since. Just a week ago he'd received his official Hungarian papers, which he produced now from a brown portfolio as if to prove to Andras it was all true. Andras unfolded Polaner's passport. Teobald Kreizel.
Permanent resident. The photograph showed a thin hollow-eyed Polaner, even paler and more horror-stricken than the young man who sat across the kitchen table from Andras now. This passport was as crisp and clean as Andras's had been when he'd left for Paris; it lacked only the telltale Zs for Zsido. The brown portfolio also contained a party identity card stamped with the ghost of a swastika, declaring Teobald Kreizel to be a member of the National Socialist Party of Germany.
"These papers will serve you well," Andras said. "Your German friend knew what he was doing."
Polaner shifted in his seat. "It's a shameful thing, a Jew posing as a Nazi."
"My God, Polaner! No one would begrudge you that protection. It'll keep you out of the Munkaszolgalat, at the very least, and I know what that's worth."
"But you've had to serve for years. And if the war goes on, you'll serve again."
"You did your time," Andras said. "Yours was far worse than mine."
"Impossible to weigh them," Polaner said.
But there were times when it was possible to weigh suffering, Andras knew. He, Andras, hadn't been raped. He hadn't lost his country or his family. Klara was asleep in the bedroom, their son beside her. Tibor and Ilana lay in each other's arms on a mattress on the sitting-room floor. Their parents were well in Debrecen. Matyas might be alive still, somewhere beyond the borders of Hungary. But Polaner had lost everything, everyone. Andras thought of the Rosh Hashanah dinner they'd eaten together at the student dining club five and a half years earlier--how Andras had marveled that Polaner's mother had let him return to school after the attack, and what Polaner had said in reply: She's never glad to see me go. She's my mother. That woman who had loved her son was gone. Her husband was gone, and their daughters were gone. And the young Andras Levi and Eli Polaner--those boys who had spent two years in Paris arguing about a war that might or might not come, drinking tea at the Blue Dove, making plans for a sports club at the center of the Quartier Latin--they, too, were gone, grown into these scarred and scraped-out men. And he lowered his head onto Polaner's sleeve and mourned for what could never be returned.
All that spring they waited for news of Matyas. When they celebrated Passover, Andras's mother insisted upon setting a place for him; when they opened the door to welcome Elijah, they were calling him home too. In the time since Andras had been sent to Ukraine, his mother and father seemed to have grown old. His father's hair had gone from gray to white. His mother's back had acquired a curve. She curled into the tent of her cardigan like a dry grass stem. Even the sight of Tamas and Adam failed to cheer her; it wasn't her grandchildren she longed for, but her lost boy.
Polaner, who knew what it meant to wait for news, kept his own mourning private. He never spoke of his parents or his sisters, as though a mention of his loss might bring on the tragedy that Andras's family dreaded. He insisted upon going alone to the Dohany Synagogue every afternoon to recite Kaddish. Tradition required him to do it for a year. But as the news continued to drift in from Poland, it began to seem as though no one could be exempt from mourning, as though no period of mourning would ever be long enough. In April, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had mounted an armed stand against the deportation of the ghetto's last sixty thousand residents; no one had expected it to last more than a few days, but the ghetto fighters held out for four weeks. The Pesti Naplo printed photographs of women throwing Molotov cocktails at German tanks, of Waffen-SS troops and Polish policemen setting buildings afire. The battle lasted until the middle of May, and ended, as everyone had known it would, with the clearing of the ghetto: a massacre of the Jewish fighters, and the deportation of those who had survived.
The next day, the Pesti Naplo reported that one and a half million Polish Jews had been killed in the war, according to the exiled Polish government's estimate. Andras, who had translated every article and radio program about the uprising for Polaner, couldn't bring himself to translate that number, to deliver that staggering statistic to a friend already in mourning. One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that? Andras knew it took three thousand to fill the seats of the Dohany Street Synagogue. To accommodate a million and a half, one would have had to replicate that building, its arches and domes, its Moorish interior, its balcony, its dark wooden pews and gilded ark, five hundred times. And then to envision each of those five hundred synagogues filled to capacity, to envision each man and woman and child inside as a unique and irreplaceable human being, the way he imagined Mendel Horovitz or the Ivory Tower or his brother Matyas, each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain--to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time--how could anyone begin to grasp it? The idea could drive a person mad. He, Andras, was still alive, and people were dependent upon him; he couldn't afford to lose his mind, and so he forced himself not to think about it.
Instead he buried himself in the work that had to be done every day. The single apartment, which had been full even when the men were away in the Munkaszolgalat, proved unlivable now that they were home. Tibor and Ilana took a flat across the street, and Jozsef moved with his parents into another small flat in the building next door.
Polaner remained with Andras and Klara, sharing a room with Tamas. For all those living spaces, rent had to be paid. Andras went back to work as a newspaper illustrator and layout artist, not at the Magyar Jewish Journal but at the Evening Courier, Mendel's former employer, where a new round of military conscriptions had decimated the ranks of graphic artists. He persuaded his editor to hire Polaner as well, arguing that Polaner had always been the true talent behind their collaborations in architecture school. Tibor, for his part, found a position as a surgical assistant in a military hospital, where the wounded of Voronezh were still being treated. Jozsef, who had never before had to earn a living, placed an ad in the Evening Courier and became a house painter, paid handsomely for his work. And Klara taught private students in the studio on Kiraly utca. Few parents now could afford the full fee, but she allowed them to pay whatever they could.
In July, as Eisenhower's armies bombed Rome, Budapest stood on the banks of the Danube in an excess of summer beauty, its palaces and grand old hotels still radiating an air of permanence. The Soviet bombardments of the previous September hadn't touched those scrolled and gilded buildings; Allied raids had failed to materialize that spring, and the Red Army's planes hadn't returned. Now the clenched fists of dahlias opened in the Varosliget, where Andras walked with Tibor and Jozsef and Polaner on Sunday afternoons, speculating about how much longer it might be before Germany capitulated and the war ended at last. Mussolini had fallen, and fascism had crumbled in Italy. On the Eastern Front, Germany's problems had multiplied and deepened: The Wehrmacht's assault on a Soviet stronghold near Kursk had ended in a disastrous rout, and defeats at Orel and Kharkov had followed soon after. Even Tibor, who a year earlier had cautioned against wishful thinking, voiced the hope th
The Jews of Hungary had been lucky, Andras knew. Thousands of men had died in the Munkaszolgalat, but not a million and a half. The rest of the Jewish population had survived the war intact. Though tens of thousands had lost their jobs and nearly all were struggling to make a living, it was still legal at least for a Jew to operate a business, own an apartment, go to synagogue to say the prayer for the dead. For more than a year and a half, Prime Minister Kallay had managed to stave off Hitler's demands for more stringent measures against Hungary's Jews; what was more, his administration had begun to pursue justice for the crimes perpetrated earlier in the war. He had called for an investigation into the Delvidek massacres, and had vowed to punish the guilty parties as severely as they deserved. And General Vilmos Nagybaczoni Nagy, before he'd given up his control of the Ministry of Defense, had called for the indictment of the officers at the heart of the military black market.
But Andras had been schooled in skepticism not only by Tibor but by the events of the past year; despite the hopeful news, he found it impossible to shake his sense of dread. More events accrued to reinforce it. As he followed the black-market trial in the newspaper that fall, it became increasingly clear that the accused officers, if they were convicted, would carry only nominal sentences. And Hitler, whose Wehrmacht had looked so vulnerable during the summer months, had halted the Allied attack south of Rome and secured Germany's southern borders. In Russia he continued to throw his troops at the Red Army, as though total defeat were impossible.
Then there was the absence of news about Matyas, who had been missing now for twenty-two months. How could anyone continue to believe he had survived? But Tibor persisted in believing it, and his mother believed it, and though his father wouldn't speak of it, Andras knew he believed it; as long as any of them did, none of them could claim even the bare comfort of grief.
The year's final act of aborted justice concerned the Hasz family and the extortion that had drained its fortunes almost to nothing. Once Gyorgy's monthly payments had dwindled to a few hundred forint, the extortionists decided that the rewards of the arrangement were no longer worth the risk. The Kallay administration seemed intent upon exposing corruption at all levels and in all branches of the government; seventeen members of the Ministry of Justice had already been indicted for financial improprieties, and Gyorgy's extortionists feared they would be next. On the twenty-fifth of October they called Gyorgy to a midnight meeting in the basement of the Ministry of Justice. That night, Andras and Klara kept a vigil with Klara's mother and Elza and Jozsef in the small dark front room of the Hasz apartment. Jozsef chain-smoked a pack of Mirjam cigarettes; Elza sat with a basket of mending beside her, needling her way through the unfamiliar ravages of poverty upon clothing. The elder Mrs. Hasz read aloud from Radnoti, the young Jewish poet Tibor admired, and whose fate in the Munkaszolgalat was unknown.
Klara, her hands pinned between her knees, sat beside Andras as if in judgment herself. If her brother came to harm, Andras knew she would hold herself responsible.
At a quarter to three in the morning a key sounded in the lock. Here was Gyorgy, soot-stained and breathless but otherwise unharmed. He removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the sofa, smoothed his pale gold tie, ran a hand through his silver-shot hair. He sat down in an empty chair and drained the glass of plum brandy his wife offered him. Then he set the empty glass on the low table before him and fixed his eyes on Klara, who sat close at his side.
"It's over," he said, covering her hand with his own. "You may exhale."
"What's over?" their mother asked. "What's happened?"
There had been a great immolation of documents, he told them. The extortionists had taken Gyorgy to his office and made him gather all evidence of the ministry's illegal relationship with the Hasz family--every letter, every telegram and payment record, every bill of sale and bank-deposit receipt--and had forced him to throw the lot into the building's incinerator, making it impossible for the Hasz family ever to mount a case against the Ministry of Justice. In return, the ministry officials produced a new set of papers for Klara, restoring the citzenship she'd lost as a young girl. Then they took the file containing all the documents pertaining to Klara's alleged crime--the photographs of the murder scene and victims, the rapist's sworn testimony revealing Klara's identity, the depositions linking Klara to the Zionist organization Gesher Zahav, the police reports documenting Klara's disappearance, and Edith Novak's statement concerning Klara's return to Hungary--and fed it, too, to the building's central incinerator.
"You saw them burn those things?" Klara said. "The dossier, the photographs--everything?"
"Everything," Gyorgy said.
"How do you know they didn't keep copies?" Jozsef said. "How do you know they don't have other documents?"
"It's possible, I suppose, but not likely. We must remember that any evidence they might retain would be evidence against them. That's why they were so eager to destroy those papers."
"But the evidence has always implicated them!" Jozsef said, rising from his chair.
"That's never bothered them before."
"These men were frightened," Hasz said. "They did a poor job of hiding it. The administration isn't on their side. They've seen seventeen of their colleagues fired, and a few imprisoned or sent to the labor service, for less than what they've done to us."
"And you destroyed everything?" Jozsef said. "Truly everything? You didn't keep a single copy? Nothing that would give us recourse later?"
Gyorgy gave his son a hard and steady look. "They held a gun to my head as I emptied the files," he said. "I would like to say I had duplicates elsewhere, but it was risky enough to keep what I had. Anyway, it's finished now. They can't open Klara's case again. I saw the documents burn."
Jozsef stood over his father's chair, his hands clenched. He seemed ready to grab his father by the shoulders and shake him. His eyes flickered toward his grandmother, his mother; then his gaze fell upon Andras and rested there. Between them lay a history so terrible as to throw the moment's frustration into a different light; to look at each other was to be reminded what it meant to escape with one's life. Jozsef sat down again and spoke to his father.
"Thank God it's over," he said. "Thank God they didn't kill you."
...
In their bedroom that night, Andras held Klara as they lay awake in the dark. How many times over the past four years had he imagined her arrested and beaten and jailed, placed far beyond his reach? He could scarcely believe that the ever-present threat was gone. Klara herself was silent and dry-eyed beside him; he knew how keenly she felt the price of her own liberation. Her return to Hungary, a risk she had undertaken for his sake, had ruined her family. She was free now, but her freedom would never extend far enough to allow her to demand legal justice or the repayment of her family's losses. Her silence wasn't directed at him, he understood, but it lay between them nonetheless. Had he ever been close to her in the way married people were supposed to be close? he wondered. Of their forty-eight months married, he had spent only twelve at home. To survive their separation they'd had to place each other at a certain remove. Every time he'd been home, including this one, there had been the fear that he would be called up again; as much as they tried to ignore it, the fact was always there. And veiling all their intimacy, shadowing it like a pair of dark wings, was what they knew was happening in Europe, and what they feared would happen to them.
But here they were together, in their shared bed, out of the grasp of danger for the moment. They lived, and he loved her. It was was folly in the French sense--madness--to keep her at a remove. It was the last thing he wanted. He touched her bare shoulder, her face, pushed a lock of hair away from her brow, and she moved closer against him.
Mindful of Polaner sleeping on the other side of the wall--of his losses, and his loneliness--they m
They hadn't taken precautions against her becoming pregnant again, though neither wanted to imagine what it might mean if she were carrying a child when the Soviets crossed the Hungarian border. As they drifted toward sleep he described in a whisper the little house he would build beside the Danube when the war was over. It was the place he had envisioned when he'd been to Angyalfold the first time, a whitewashed brick house with a tile roof, a garden large enough for a pair of milking goats, an outdoor bread oven, a shaded patio, a pergola laced with grapevines. Klara slept at last, but Andras lay awake beside her, far from comfort. Once again, he thought, he had drawn a plan for an imaginary house, one in a long line of imaginary houses he had built since they'd been together; in his mind he could page through a deep stack of them, those ghostly blueprints of a life they had not yet lived and might never live.
...