The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

  On Saturday afternoons, when the weather was fine, Andras and Klara made a point of walking alone on Margaret Island for an hour or two while Polaner played with Tamas in the park. It was during those walks that they spoke of the things Andras could not write about in his brief and censored letters from Ukraine: the reasons for their deportation, and the role that The Crooked Rail may have played; the circumstances surrounding Mendel's death; the long struggle with Jozsef afterward; and the strange conjunctions of the journey home. On the first subject, Andras's greatest fear was that Klara herself might hold him responsible for what had happened, might blame him for keeping the family from attempting its escape. She had warned him; he hadn't forgotten it for a moment. But she was at pains to reassure him that no one held him responsible for what had happened. Such an idea, she said, was a symptom of the loss of perspective caused by the Munkaszolgalat and the war. The journey to Palestine might easily have ended in disaster. His deportation may have saved them all. Now that he had returned, she was at liberty to be grateful that they'd been spared the uncertainties of the trip. To the second subject she reacted with grief and dismay, and Andras was reminded that she, too, had been present at the death of her closest friend and ally; she, too, had been witness to the senseless killing of a man she had loved since childhood. And on the third subject, she could say only that she understood what it must have required for Andras to keep from doing some great violence to Jozsef. But the time in Ukraine, and with Andras, had changed Jozsef in some deep-rooted way, she thought; he seemed a different man since his return, or perhaps he seemed finally to have become a man.

  For reasons Andras found difficult to articulate, the most difficult subject was that of Zoltan Novak's death. Months of Saturday walks passed before he could tell Klara that he had been with Novak on the last days of his life, and that he had buried Novak himself. She had read of Novak's death in the newspapers and had mourned his loss before Andras's return, but she wept afresh at that news. She asked Andras to tell her everything that had happened: how he had discovered Novak, what they had said to each other, how Novak had died. When he had finished, putting matters as gently as possible and omitting many painful details, Klara offered an admission of her own: She and Novak had exchanged nearly a dozen letters during his long months of service.

  They had paused in their walk at the ruin of a Franciscan church halfway up the eastern side of the island: stones that looked as though they had risen from the earth, a rose window empty of glass, Gothic windows missing their topmost points. It was December, but the day was unseasonably mild; in the shadow of the ruin stood a bench where a husband and wife might make confession, even if they were Jewish. Even if no confessor was present except each other.

  "How did he write to you?" Andras asked.

  "He sent letters with officers who came and went on leave."

  "And you wrote back."

  She folded her wet handkerchief and looked toward the empty rose window. "He was alone and bereaved. He didn't have anyone. Even his little son had died by then."

  "Your letters must have been a comfort," Andras said with some effort, and followed her gaze toward the ruin. In one of the lobes of the rose window a bird had built its nest; the nest was long abandoned now, its dry grass streamers fluttering in the wind.

  "I tried not to give him false hope," Klara said. "He knew the limitations of my feelings for him."

  Andras had to believe her. The man he had seen in the granary in Ukraine could not have been operating under the illusion that someone was nursing a secret love for him. He was a man who had been forsaken by everything that had mattered, a man who had lived to see the ruin of all he had done on earth. "I don't begrudge him your letters,"

  Andras said. "I can't blame you for anything you might have written to him. He was always good to you. He was good to both of us."

  Klara put a hand on Andras's knee. "He never regretted what he did for you," she said. "He told me he'd spoken to you at the Operahaz. He said you were much kinder than you might have been. He said, in fact, that if I had to marry anyone, he was glad it was you."

  Andras covered her hand with his own and looked up again at the bird's nest shivering in the rose window. He had seen architectural drawings of this church in its unruined state, its Gothic lines graceful but unremarkable, indistinguishable from those of thousands of other Gothic chapels. As a ruin it had taken on something of the extraordinary. The perfect masonry of the far wall had been laid bare; the near wall had weathered into a jagged staircase, the edges of the stones worn to velvet. The rose window was more elegant for its lack of glass, the bones of its corolla scoured by wind and bleached white in the sun. The nest with its streamers was a final unbidden touch: It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.

  His most melancholy times that year were those he spent alone with Tibor.

  Wherever they walked, whatever they did--whether they were occupying their usual table at the Artists' Cafe, or strolling the paths of the Varosliget, or standing at the railing of the Szechenyi Bridge and looking down into the twisting water--when he was with Tibor, Andras understood acutely that they were at the mercy of events beyond their control.

  The Danube, which had once seemed a magic conduit along which they might slip out of Hungary, had become an ordinary river once more; Klein was in jail, their visas expired, the Trasnet no more than the memory of a name. Before, Tibor's will had seemed to Andras an inexorable force. He had always had a preternatural talent for making the impossible come to pass. But their escape had not come to pass, and now they had no secret plan of action to balance against their fears. Tibor himself had undergone a change; he had been in the Munkaszolgalat for three years now, and like Andras he had been forced to learn its difficult lessons. He had carried a great weight since his return from the Eastern Front, it seemed to Andras--the weight of dozens of human bodies, the living and the dead, every sick or wounded man he'd cared for in the labor service and in the hospital where he'd been working in Budapest. "We couldn't save him," his stories often ended. He told Andras in detail about bleeding that couldn't be stopped, dysentery that turned men inside out, pneumonia that broke ribs and asphyxiated its victims.

  And the bodies continued to accumulate, even in Budapest, far from the front lines of the war. One evening Tibor appeared at the offices of the Courier and asked if Andras might want to knock off a bit early; a young man whom Tibor had tended had died a few hours earlier on the operating table, and Tibor needed a drink. Andras took his brother to a bar they had always liked, a narrow amber-lit place called the Trolley Bell.

  There, over glasses of Aquincum beer, Tibor told Andras the story: The boy had been wounded months earlier in the battle of Voronezh, had taken shrapnel in both lungs and hadn't been able to breathe properly since. A risky operation to remove the fragments had severed the pulmonary artery, and the boy had died on the table. Tibor had been present in the waiting room when the doctor, a talented and well-respected surgeon named Keresztes, had delivered the news to the boy's parents. Tibor had expected cries, protests, a collapse, but the young man's mother had risen from her chair and calmly explained that her son could not be dead. She showed Keresztes the jersey she had just finished knitting for the boy. It was composed of wool that had been immersed in a well in Szentgotthard where the Blessed Virgin's face had appeared three times. She had just tied off the last stitch when the surgeon came in. She must be allowed to lay the jersey over her son; he was not dead, only in a state of deep sleep under the Virgin's watch. When Keresztes began to explain the circumstances of the boy's death, and the impossibility of his recovery, the young man's father had threatened to slit the surgeon's throat with his own scalpel if the mother were not allowed to do what she wished. The surgeon, weary from the long procedure, had escorted the parents to their son's bedside in a room near the
operating theater and had left Tibor to oversee their visit with the dead boy. The mother had laid the jersey over the matrix of bandages on the boy's chest, and had commenced to pray the Rosary. But the Virgin's blessing failed to revive her son. The boy lay inert, and by the time she had reached the end of her line of beads she seemed to comprehend the situation. Her boy was gone, had died in Budapest after having survived the battle of Voronezh; nothing would bring him back now. When a nurse had come in to remove the body so the room might be used for another patient, Tibor had asked her to let the parents stay there with the boy as long as they wished. The nurse had insisted the room be cleared; the new patient would be out of surgery in a quarter of an hour. The boy's parents, understanding that they had no choice, shuffled toward the door. On the threshold, the mother had pressed the jersey into Tibor's hands. He must take it, she said, as it could no longer be of any use to her son.

  Tibor opened his leather satchel now and took out the jersey, gray yarn knitted in close regular stitches. He laid it on his knees and smoothed the wool. "Do you know what the worst of it was?" he said. "When Keresztes left the room, he rolled his eyes at me.

  What fools, these fanatics. I know the mother saw him." He rested his chin on his hand, regarding Andras with an expression so laced with pain as to make Andras's throat constrict. "The worst of it was, all my sympathies lay with Keresztes at that moment. I should have wanted to beat him to a pulp for rolling his eyes at a time like that, but all I could think was, My God, how long is this going to take? How soon can we get these people out of here?"

  Andras could only nod in understanding. He knew Tibor didn't need reassurance that he was a good man, that under different circumstances his sympathies would have lain with the parents instead of with the exhausted surgeon; he and his brother had perfect comprehension of each other's minds and inward lives. Simply to have heard the story was enough. A long silence settled between them as they drank their beer. Then, finally, Tibor spoke again.

  "I had a piece of good news on my way out of the hospital," he said. "One of the nurses caught it on the radio. The generals from the Delvidek massacres, Feketehalmy-Czeydner and the others, are going to jail this Monday. Feketehalmy-Czeydner's in for fifteen years, I understand, and the others nearly as many. Let's hope they rot there."

  Andras didn't have the heart to tell his brother the rest of that story, which he'd heard just before Tibor had arrived at the newsroom: Feketehalmy-Czeydner and the three other officers convicted in the Delvidek case, facing the start of their long prison sentences, had fled that very day to Vienna, where they'd been seen dining at a famous beer hall in the company of six Gestapo officers. The Evening Courier's Viennese correspondent had been close enough to observe that the men had been eating veal sausage with peppers and toasting the health of the Supreme Commander of the Third Reich. The Fuhrer himself, it was rumored, had extended the officers a guarantee of political asylum. But Tibor would read about it soon enough in the papers. For now, Andras thought, let him have a moment of peace, if that was the word for it.

  "To rotting in jail," he said, and raised his glass.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Occupation

  IN M ARCH of 1944, not long after Klara had discovered she was pregnant again, the papers would report that Horthy had been called to Schloss Klessheim for a conference with Hitler. With him went the new minister of defense, Lajos Csatay, who had replaced Vilmos Nagy; and Ferenc Szombathelyi, chief of the General Staff. Prime Minister Kallay proclaimed to the newspapers that the Magyar nation had reason to be hopeful: What Hitler wanted to discuss was the withdrawal of Hungarian troops from the Eastern Front. Tibor speculated that this turn of events might bring Matyas home at last when all else had failed to do so.

  The evening of the Klessheim conference found Andras and Jozsef at the Pineapple Club, the underground cabaret near Vorosmarty ter where Matyas had once danced on the lid of a white piano. The piano was still there; at the keyboard was Berta Turk, a vaudevillian of the old school, whose snaky coiffure called to mind a Beardsleyesque Medusa. Jozsef had received tickets to the show as payment for a house-painting job. Berta Turk had been an adolescent fad of his; he couldn't resist the chance to see her, and he insisted that Andras accompany him. He lent Andras a silk dinner jacket and outfitted himself in a tuxedo he had brought home from Paris five years earlier. For Madame Turk he had a bouquet of red hothouse roses that must have cost half his weekly earnings. He and Andras sat near the stage and drank tall narrow glasses of the club's special medicine, a rum cocktail flavored with coconut. Berta delivered her punning innuendoes in a low raw-honey voice, her eyebrows dipping and rising like a cartoon moll's. Andras liked that Jozsef-the-adolescent had fixed on this strange object of obsession instead of on some cold and voiceless beauty of the silver screen. But he found he had little heart for Berta's jokes; he was thinking of Matyas, feeling him present everywhere in that room--tapping out a jazz beat at the bar, or lounging on the lid of the piano, or laying a line of hot tin across the stage like Fred Astaire. At the break, Andras stepped outside to clear his head. The night was cool and damp, the streets full of people seeking distraction. A trio of perfumed young women brushed past him, heels clicking, evening coats swaying; from a jazz club across the way, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" filtered through a velvet-curtained entrance. Andras looked up past the scrolled cornice of the building to a sky illuminated by an egg-shaped moon, threads of cloud tracing illegible lines of text across its face. It seemed close enough for him to reach up and take it in his hand.

  "Got a light?" a man asked him.

  Andras blinked the moon away and shook his head. The man, a dark-haired young soldier in a Hungarian Army uniform, begged a match from a passerby and lit his friend's cigarette, then his own.

  "It's true, I tell you," the man's friend said. "If Markus says there's going to be an occupation, there'll be an occupation."

  "Your cousin's a fascist. He'd love nothing more than a German occupation. But he doesn't know what he's talking about. Horthy and Hitler are negotiating as we speak."

  "Precisely! It's a distraction tactic."

  Everyone had a theory; every man who had returned alive from the Eastern Front thought he knew how the war would unfold, on the large scale and the small. Every theory seemed as plausible as the last, or as implausible; every amateur military theorist believed just as fiercely that he alone could beat order from the chaos of the war. Andras and Tibor, Jozsef and Polaner, were all guilty of bearing that illusion. Each had his own set of theories, and each believed the others to be hopelessly misguided. How long, Andras wondered, could they keep building arguments based on reason when the war defied reason at every turn? How long before they all fell silent? It might even be true that the Germans were carrying out an occupation of Hungary that very moment; anything might be true, anything at all. Matyas himself might be jumping from the mouth of a boxcar at Keleti Station, slinging his knapsack over his shoulder, and heading to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca.

  Through a haze of coconut-scented rum, Andras drifted back inside and wandered toward their table beside the stage, where Jozsef had engaged Madame Turk's attention and was paying his compliments. Madame Turk, it seemed, was saying farewell for the evening; a piece of urgent news had made it necessary for her to leave at once. She suffered Jozsef to kiss her hand, tucked one of his roses behind her ear, and swept off across the stage.

  "What was the piece of news?" Andras asked when she'd gone.

  "I haven't the slightest idea," Jozsef said, afloat on his own delight. He insisted they have another round of drinks before they left, and suggested they take a cab home.

  But when Andras reminded him what he'd already spent that evening, Jozsef allowed himself to be led to the streetcar stop on Vamhaz korut, where a noisy crowd had gathered to wait for the tram.

  By that time everyone seemed to have heard the same set of rumors: A transport of SS troops, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand of them, had
arrived at a station near the capital, were marching east, and would soon breach the city limits.

  Armored and motorized German divisions were said to have advanced into Hungary from every direction; the airports at Ferihegy and Debrecen had been occupied. When the streetcar arrived, the ticket girl proclaimed loudly that if any German soldier tried to board her car, she'd spit in his face and tell him where to go. A bawdy cheer rose from the passengers. Someone started singing "Isten, ald meg a Magyart," and then everyone was shouting the national anthem as the streetcar rolled down Vamhaz korut.

  Andras and Jozsef listened in silence. If the rumors were true, if a German occupation was under way, Kallay's government wouldn't last the night; Andras could well imagine the kind of regime that would replace it. For six years now, he and the rest of the world had been receiving a lesson in German occupation and its effects. But what could be the purpose of an occupation now? The war was as good as lost for Germany.

  Everyone knew that. On all fronts, Hitler's armies were close to collapse. Where would he even find the troops necessary to carry out an occupation? The Hungarian military wouldn't take kindly to the idea of German command. There might be armed resistance, a patriotic backlash. The generals of the Honvedseg would never submit without a fight, not after Hitler had thrown away so many Hungarian lives on the Eastern Front.

  At their stop, Andras and Jozsef got off and stood on the pavement, looking up and down the street as if for some sign of the Wehrmacht. Saturday night seemed to be proceeding as before. Cabs tore along the boulevard with their cargos of partygoers, and the sidewalks were full of men and women in evening clothes.