The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
"Are we supposed to believe this?" Andras said. "Am I supposed to bring this news home to Klara?"
"If it's true, I'll bet the army will put up a fight."
"I was thinking that, too. But even if they do, how long can it last?"
Jozsef took out his cigarette case, and, finding it empty, drew a narrow silver flask from his breast pocket. He took a long pull, then offered it to Andras.
Andras shook his head. "I've had enough to drink," he said, and turned toward home. They walked up Wesselenyi to Nefelejcs utca, then turned and said a grim good-night at the doorstep, promising to see each other in the morning.
Upstairs in the darkened apartment, Tamas had joined Klara in bed, his spine nestled against her belly. When Andras climbed into bed with them, Tamas turned over and backed up against him, his bottom needling into Andras's gut, his feet hot against Andras's thigh. Klara sighed in her sleep. Andras put an arm around them both, wide awake, and lay for hours listening to their breathing.
At seven o'clock the next morning they woke to a pounding at the door. It was Jozsef, hatless and coatless, his shirtsleeves stained with blood. His father had just been arrested by the Gestapo. Klara's mother had fallen into a dead faint moments after the men had taken Gyorgy, and had struck her head on a coal fender; Elza was on the verge of nervous collapse. Andras must get Tibor at once, and Klara must come with Jozsef.
In the confused moments that followed, Klara insisted that it couldn't have been the Gestapo, that Jozsef must have been mistaken. As he pulled on his boots, Andras had to tell her that it could in fact have been the Gestapo, that the city had been burning with rumors of a German occupation the night before. Andras ran to Tibor's apartment and Klara to the Haszes'; a quarter of an hour later they were assembled around the bed of the elder Mrs. Hasz, who had by then regained consciousness and insisted upon relating what had happened before her fall. Two Gestapo men had arrived at half past six that morning, had dragged Gyorgy from his bed in his nightclothes, had shouted at him in German, and had pushed him into an armored car and taken him away. That was when she had lost her balance and taken a fall. She put a hand to her head, where a rectangle of gauze covered a gash from the fireplace fender.
"Why Gyorgy?" she said. "Why would they take him? What did he do?"
No one could answer her. And within a few hours they began to hear of other arrests: a former colleague of Gyorgy's from the bank; the Jewish vice president of a bond-trading company; a prominent Leftist writer, a non-Jew, who had authored a bitter anti-Nazi pamphlet; three of Miklos Kallay's closest advisors; and a liberal member of parliament, Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, who had met the Gestapo with a pistol in hand and had engaged them in a firefight before he'd been wounded and dragged away. That night Jozsef took the risk of going to inquire at the jail on Margit korut, where political prisoners were held, but was told only that his father was in German custody, and would be held until it could be proved that he didn't constitute a threat to the occupation.
That was Sunday. By Monday the order had come for all Jewish citizens of Budapest to deliver their radios and telephones-- volunteer was the word the Nazis used--to an office of the Ministry of Defense at Szabadsag ter. By Wednesday it was decreed that any Jewish person who owned a car or bicycle had to sell it to the government for use in the war-- sell was the word the Nazis used, but there was no money exchanged; the Nazis distributed payment vouchers that were soon discovered to be irredeemable for real currency. By Friday there were notices posted all over town notifying Jews that by April fifth they would be required to wear the yellow star. Soon afterward, the rumor began to circulate that the prominent Jews who had been arrested would be deported to labor camps in Germany. Klara went to the bank to withdraw what was left of their savings, hoping they might bribe someone into releasing Gyorgy. But she found she could get no more than a thousand pengo all Jewish accounts had been frozen. The next day a new German order required Jews to surrender all jewelry and gold items. Klara and her mother and Elza gave up a few cheap pieces, hid their wedding bands and engagement rings in a pillowcase at the bottom of the flour bin, and packed the rest into velvet pouches, which Jozsef carried to the Margit korut prison to plead for his father's release.
The guards confiscated the jewelry, beat Jozsef black and blue, and threw him into the street.
On the twentieth of April, Tibor lost his position at the hospital. Andras and Polaner were dismissed from the Evening Courier and informed that they wouldn't find work at any daily paper in town. Jozsef, employed informally and paid under the table, went on with his painting business, but his list of clients began to shrink. By the first week of May, signs had gone up in the windows of shops and restaurants, cafes and movie theaters and public baths, declaring that Jews were not welcome. Andras, coming home one afternoon from the park with Tamas, stopped short on the sidewalk across from their neighborhood bakery. In the window was a sign almost identical to the one he'd seen at the bakery in Stuttgart seven years earlier. But this sign was written in Hungarian, his own language, and this was his own street, the street where he lived with his wife and son. Struck faint, he sat down on the curb with Tamas and stared across the way into the lighted window of the shop. All looked ordinary there: the girl in her white cap, the glossy loaves and pastries in the case, the gold curlicues of the bakery's name. Tamas pointed and said the name of the pastry he liked, makos keksz. Andras had to tell him that there would be no makos keksz that day. So much had become forbidden, and so quickly.
Even being out on the streets was dangerous. There was a new five o'clock curfew for Jews; those who failed to comply could be arrested or shot. Andras pulled out his father's pocket watch, as familiar now as if it were a part of his own body. Ten minutes to five.
He got to his feet and picked up his son, and when he reached home, Klara met him at the door with his call-up notice in her hand.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Farewell
THIS TIME they were together, Andras and Jozsef and Tibor; Polaner had been exempted, thanks to his false identity papers and medical-status documents. The labor battalions had been regrouped. Three hundred and sixty-five new companies had been added. Because Andras and Jozsef and Tibor lived in the same district, they had all been assigned to the 55/10th. Their send-off had been like a funeral at which the dead, the three young men, had been piled with goods to take into the next world. As much food as they could carry. Warm clothes. Woolen blankets. Vitamin pills and rolls of bandage.
And in Tibor's pack, drugs pilfered from the hospital where he had worked. Anticipating their call-up, he had felt no compunction about laying aside vials of antibiotic and morphine, packets of suture, sterile needles and scissors and clamps: a kit of tools he prayed he wouldn't have to use.
Klara had not been with them at the train station for their departure. Andras had said goodbye to her that morning at home, in their bedroom at Nefelejcs utca. The first nine weeks of her pregnancy had passed without event, but in the tenth she was seized with a violent nausea that began every morning at three o'clock and lasted almost until noon. That morning she'd been sick for hours; Andras had stayed with her as she bent over the toilet bowl and dry-heaved until her face streamed with tears. She begged him to go to bed, to get some sleep before he had to face the ordeal of his journey, but he wouldn't do it, wouldn't have left her side for anything in the world. At six in the morning her strength broke. Shaking with exhaustion, she cried and cried until she lost her voice.
It was intolerable, she whispered, impossible, that Andras could be here with her one day, intact and safe, and the next be taken away to the hell from which he'd come last spring.
Given to her and taken away. Given and taken away. When so much of what she'd loved had been taken away. He couldn't remember a time when she had stated her fear, her sense of desolation, so plainly. Even at their worst times in Paris, she had held something back; something had been hidden from him, some essential part of her being that she'd had to guar
She cried and cried, beyond consolation, beyond caring whether anyone heard; as he rocked her in his arms he had the sense that he was watching her mourn him--that he had already died and was witnessing her grief. He stroked her damp hair and said her name over and over again, there on the bathroom floor, feeling, strangely, as if they were finally married, as if what had existed between them before had only been preparation for this deeper and more painful connection. He kissed her temple, her cheekbone, the wet margin of her ear. And then he wept, too, at the thought of leaving her alone to face what might come.
At dawn, just before he had to dress, he took her to bed and slid in beside her. "I won't do it," he said. "They'll have to drag me away from you."
"I'll be fine," she tried to tell him. "My mother will be with me. And Ilana, and Elza. And Polaner."
"Tell my son his father loves him," Andras said. "Tell him that every night." He took his father's pocket watch from the nightstand and pressed it into Klara's palm. "I want him to have this, when it's time."
"No," she said. "Don't do that. You'll give it to him yourself." She folded it into his own hand. And then it was morning, and he had to go.
Again the boxcars. Again the darkness and the pressure of men. Here was Jozsef beside him, inevitable; and Tibor, his brother, his scent as familiar as their childhood bed.
This time they were headed, as if into the past, toward Debrecen. Andras knew exactly what was passing outside: the hills melting into flatlands, the fields, the farms. But now the fields, if they were worked, were worked by forced-labor companies; the farmers and their sons were all at war. The patient horses shied at the unfamiliar voices of their drivers. The dogs barked at the strangers, never growing accustomed to their scent. The women watched the workers with suspicion and kept their daughters inside. Maglod, Tapiogyorgy, Ujszasz, those one-street towns whose train stations still bore geraniums in window boxes: They had been stripped of their Christian men of military age, and their Jewish men of labor-service age, and would soon be stripped of the rest of their Jewish inhabitants. Already the concentrations and deportations had begun--deportations, when Horthy had vowed never to deport. Dome Sztojay was prime minister now, and he was doing what the Germans had told him to do. Concentrate the Jews of the small towns in ghettoes in the larger towns. Count them carefully. Make lists. Tell them they were needed for a great labor project in the east; hold out the promise of resettlement, of a better life elsewhere. Instruct them each to pack a single suitcase. Bring them to the rail yard. Load them onto trains. The trains left daily for the west, returned empty, and were filled again; an unspeakable dread settled over those who remained and waited. The few, like Polaner, who had already been inside German camps and had lived to tell about them, knew there was to be no resettlement. They knew the purpose of those camps; they knew the product of the great labor project. They told their stories and were disbelieved.
For Andras and Tibor and Jozsef, the four-hour trip to Debrecen took three days.
The train stopped at the platforms of the little towns; in some places they could hear other boxcars being coupled to their own, more work servicemen being fed into the combustion engine of the war. No food or water except what they'd brought. No place to relieve themselves except the can at the back of the car. Long before they pulled into the station at Debrecen, Andras recognized the pattern of track-switching that characterized the approach. In the semidarkness, Tibor's eyes met Andras's and held them. Andras knew he was thinking of their parents, who had withstood so many departures, who had already lost one son and whose two remaining sons were now headed toward the fighting again.
Two weeks earlier, Bela and Flora had been locked into a ghetto that happened to contain their building on Simonffy utca. There had been no way, no time, to say goodbye. Now Andras and Tibor were at Debrecen Station, not fifteen minutes' walk from that ghetto, if there had been any way to get off the train, and any way to walk through the city without being shot.
The boxcar sat on its track in Debrecen all night. It was too dark for Andras to read his father's pocket watch; there was no way to determine how late it was, how many hours until morning. They couldn't know whether they would leave that day or be forced to remain in the reeking dark while more cars were hitched to theirs, more men loaded aboard. They took turns sitting; they drowsed and woke. And then, in the stillest hour of the night, they heard footsteps on the gravel outside the car. Not the heavy tread of the guards, but tentative footsteps; then a quiet knocking on the side of the boxcar.
"Fredi
Paszternak?"
"Geza
Mohr?"
"Semyon
Kovacs?"
No one responded. Everyone was awake now, everyone stilled with fear. If these seekers were caught, they would be killed. Everyone knew the consequences.
After a moment the footsteps moved on. More seekers approached. Rubin Gold?
Gyorgy Toronyi? The names came in a steady stream; soft excited voices could be heard from a nearby car, where someone had found who they were looking for. And then, in the next wave of seekers, Andras Levi? Tibor Levi?
Andras and Tibor rushed to the side of the car and called to their parents in hushed voices: Anyu, Apu. The diminutive forms not used since childhood. Andras and Tibor made young again in their extremity, by the impossible closeness and untouchability of their mother, Flora; their father, Bela. Inside the boxcar, men pushed aside to give them room, a measure of privacy in that packed enclosure.
"Andi! Tibi!" Their mother's voice, desperate with pain and relief.
"But how did you get here?" Tibor asked.
"Your father bribed a policeman," their mother said. "We had an official escort."
"Are you all right, boys?" Their father's voice again, asking a question whose answer was already known, and to which Andras and Tibor could only respond with a lie.
"Do you know where they're sending you?"
They did not.
There was little time to talk. Little time for Bela and Flora to do what they had come to do. A package appeared at the bars of the single high window, looped to a metal hook with a length of brown twine. The package, too large to fit through the window bars, had to be lowered again and broken down into its components. Two woolen sweaters. Two scarves. Tight-wrapped packages of food. A packet of money: two thousand pengo. How had they saved it? How had they kept it hidden? And two pairs of sturdy boots, which had to be left behind; no way to pass them through the window.
Then their father's voice again, saying the prayer for travel.
Flora and Bela hurried through the darkened streets toward home, each carrying a pair of sturdy boots. Behind them, with a hand on their shoulders as though they were under arrest, was the bribed policeman, a former member of Bela's chess club, who had arranged for them to slip out through a cellar that joined two buildings, one inside the ghetto, one out. Others had slipped out in the same manner and returned safely, though some had failed to return and had not been heard from again. They were entirely at the mercy of this policeman with whom Bela had shared a few chess matches, a few glasses of beer. But they had little fear of what might happen now, little fear of being turned over to a less sympathetic member of the Debrecen police; now that they had delivered the food, the sweaters, the money, had exchanged a few words with the boys, had given them their blessing, what else mattered? What a waste it would have been to be caught with the packages in hand, but they'd been lucky; the streets had been nearly empty when they'd left the ghetto. Bela's intelligence sources, a rail-yard foreman of his long acquaintance and the bartender called Rudolf, had both proved reliable. The train was th
What a luxury it had been, Lucky Bela thought, to have had the time and inclination for a quarrel. He had admired his son's defense of his choice of wife. In the end he had been right, too: Klara had been a good match for him--as good, it seemed, as Flora had been for Bela. Lucky. Yes, he was lucky, even now. Flora was there at his side, the policeman's hand on her shoulder--his wife, the mother of his sons, willing to risk her life for them in the middle of the night, despite his protests; unwilling to allow him to go alone.
At last the policeman delivered them to the courtyard that led to the cellar. With an antiquated and incongruous politeness, he held the door as they entered that tunnel back to their enclosed lives. Before long they had reached their own building and climbed the stairs to their apartment, where they undressed in the dark without a word. There would only be a few hours to sleep before they would rise to the circumscribed business of their day. In bed, Flora pulled the coverlet to her chin and let out a sigh. There was nothing more they could say to each other, nothing more to do. Their boys, their babies.