The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
Another day passed and darkened. Another night. Someone--Tibor?--tipped water into his mouth; he choked, swallowed. In the morning he crawled out of the boxcar, trying to escape the smell of himself. Unaccountably his head felt clearer. He paused, kneeling, and thrust his hand into the pocket of his overcoat, where, when there had been bread, he had carried bread. The pocket was sandy with crumbs. He pulled himself to a puddle where the sun had melted the snow. In one hand he held the crumbs. With the other he scooped water from the puddle. He made a cold paste, put his hand to his mouth, ate. It was his first solid food in twenty days, though he did not know it.
Sometime later he woke in the boxcar. Jozsef Hasz was bending over him, urging him to sit up. "Give it a try," Jozsef said, and lifted him from beneath the shoulders.
Andras sat up. Black ocean waves seemed to close over his head. Then, like a miracle, they receded. Here was the familiar interior of the boxcar. Here was Jozsef kneeling beside him, supporting his back with both hands.
"You're going to have to stand now," Jozsef said.
"Why?"
"Someone's coming to gather men for a work detail. Anyone who can't work will be shot."
He knew he wouldn't be selected for a work detail. He could scarcely raise his head. And then he remembered again: "Tibor?"
Jozsef shook his head. "Just me."
"Where's
my
brother,
Jozsef?
Where's my brother?"
"They've been desperate for workers," Jozsef said. "If a man can stand, they take him."
"Who?"
"The
Germans."
"They
took
Tibor?"
"I don't know, Andraska," Jozsef said, his voice breaking. "I don't know where he is. I haven't seen him for days."
Outside the boxcar, a German voice called men to attention.
"We're going to have to walk now," Jozsef said.
Tears came to Andras's eyes: To die now, after everything. But Jozsef took him from beneath the arms and hoisted him to his feet. Andras fell against him. Jozsef swayed and yelped in pain; his shattered leg, freed from its cast, could only have been half knit.
But he caught Andras around the back and led him toward the door of the boxcar. Slid it aside. Took Andras down a ramp and out onto the cold bare dirt of the rail yard. Thin blades of pain shot up from Andras's feet and through his legs. In his side, along the surgical wound, a dull orange burning.
A Nazi officer stood before a row of labor servicemen, inspecting their soiled, ribbon-torn overcoats and trousers, their rag-bound feet. Andras's and Jozsef's feet were bare.
The officer cleared his throat. "All those who want to work, step forward."
All the men stepped forward. Jozsef pulled Andras, whose legs buckled. Andras fell forward onto his hands and knees on the bare ground. The officer came toward him and knelt; he put a hand to the back of Andras's neck, and reached into his own overcoat pocket. Andras imagined the barrel of a pistol, a noise, an explosion of light. To his shame, he felt his bladder release.
The officer had drawn out a handkerchief. He mopped Andras's brow and helped him to his feet.
"I want to work," Andras said. He had managed the words in German: Ich mochte arbeiten.
"How can you work?" the officer said. "You can't even walk."
Andras looked into the man's face. He appeared almost as hungry, almost as ragged, as the work servicemen themselves; his age was impossible to determine. His cheeks, slack and windburned, showed a growth of colorless stubble. A small oval scar marked his jawline. He rubbed the scar with his thumb as he looked at Andras contemplatively.
"A wagon will be here in a few minutes," he said at last. "You'll come with us."
"Where are we going?" Andras dared to ask. Wohin gehen wir?
"To Austria. To a work camp. There's a doctor there who can help you."
Everything seemed to have a terrible second meaning. Austria. A work camp. A doctor who could help him. Andras put a hand on Jozsef's arm to steady himself, pulled himself to his bare feet, and made himself look into the Nazi's eyes. The Nazi held his gaze, then turned sharply and marched off through the rows of boxcars. Exhausted, Andras leaned against Jozsef until the wagon arrived. The Nazi officer quick-stepped alongside the wagon, carrying a pair of boots. He helped Andras and Jozsef into the wagon bed, then put the boots into Andras's lap.
"Heil Hitler," the officer said, saluting as the wagon pulled away.
A hundred times it might have been the end. It might have been the end when the wagon arrived at the work camp and the men were inspected, if the inspector hadn't been a Jewish kapo who had taken pity on Andras and Jozsef--he'd assigned them to a work brigade rather than sending them to the infirmary, though they could scarcely walk. It might have been the end, again, on the day their group of a hundred men failed to meet its work quota: They were supposed to load fifty pallets of bricks onto flatbed trucks, and they'd only loaded forty-nine; as punishment, the guards selected two men, a gray-haired chemist from Budapest and a shoemaker from Kaposvar, and executed them behind the brick factory. It might have been the end when the food at the camp ran out, had not Andras and Jozsef, digging a trench for a latrine, come upon four clay jars buried in the ground: a cache of goose fat, a relic of a time when the camp had been a farm, and the farmer's wife had foreseen lean days ahead. It might have been the end if the men at the camp had had time to finish their project, a vast crematorium in which their bodies would be burned after they had been gassed or shot. But it was not the end. On the first of April, as the exhausted and starving men waited to be marched from the assembly ground to the brickyard for the day's work, Jozsef touched Andras's shoulder and pointed toward a line of vehicles speeding along the military road beyond the barbed-wire fence.
"See that?" Jozsef said. "I don't think we're going to work today."
Andras raised his eyes. "Why not?"
"Look." He pointed along the curve of the road as it bent away toward the east. A confusion of German and Hungarian armored vehicles bumped along the rutted track, some leaving the roadbed to pass, others getting mired in the deep mud of the road, or spinning out of control into the ditches. Behind them, as far as Andras could see, a line of sleeker, swifter tanks barreled in their direction: Soviet T-34s, the kind he'd seen in Ukraine and Subcarpathia. That explained why their work foreman still hadn't appeared, though it was half past seven: The Russians had come at last, and the Germans and Hungarians were running for their lives. At that moment the camp loudspeaker broadcast a command for all inmates to return to their quarters, gather their belongings, and meet at the camp gates to await orders for redeployment. But Jozsef sat down just where he was and crossed his legs before him.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said, "Not a step. If the Russians are coming, I'm going to sit here and wait."
The announcement raised a shout from the other men, some of whom threw their caps in the air. They stood in the assembly yard and watched their Nazi guards and work foremen flee the camp, some on foot, others in jeeps or trucks. No one seemed to take notice of the few men who'd gathered with their belongings near the gate. No further orders came over the loudspeaker; anyone who might have given orders had gone. Some of the inmates hid in the barracks, but Andras and Jozsef and many of the others climbed a low hill and watched a battle unfold in the neighboring fields. A battalion of German tanks had turned to meet the Soviets, and the cannons barked and roared for hours. All day and into the night they watched and cheered the Red Army. After dark, gunfire made an aurora in the eastern sky. Somewhere beyond that peony-colored light was the border of Hungary, and beyond that the road that led to Budapest.
At dawn the next day, a Soviet detachment arrived to take charge of the camp.
The soldiers wore gray jackets and mud-smeared blue breeches. Their boots were miraculously intact, and their leather straps and belts gleamed with polish. They stopped just outside the gates and
The men walked through the storehouse as if through a museum of a bygone age. There on the shelves were luxuries they hadn't seen for months--tinned sausages, tinned pears, tinned peas; slender boxes of cigarettes; stacks of batteries and bars of soap. They packed those things into squares of canvas or empty cement bags, hoping they might sell or trade them on the way home. Then the Soviets marched the men to a processing camp thirty kilometers away on the Hungarian border, where they lived for three weeks in filthy overcrowded barracks before they were given liberation papers and released. They were two hundred and fifteen kilometers from Budapest. The only way to get there was to walk.
They trusted nobody, traveled at night, evaded the last few fleeing Nazis, who would shoot any Jews they met, and the Soviet liberators, who, it was rumored, could take away your liberation papers and send you off to work camps in Siberia for no reason at all. Jozsef's injured leg meant they had to travel slowly; he could manage no more than ten kilometers before the pain stopped him. From the direction of the city, reports of horrors drifted across the rolling hills of Transdanubia: Budapest bombed to rubble.
Hundreds of thousands deported. A winter of starvation. The part of Andras's mind that he was accustomed to sending in Klara's direction had shriveled to a hard knot, like scar tissue. He allowed himself to imagine nothing beyond the moment's necessary work; he fixed his mind on his own survival. He would not allow himself to remember the first weeks of the year, that gray-blue blur of horror that was January 1945. The surgical wound in his side had healed to a puckered pink seam; the injured spleen, the torn intestine, had resumed their invisible work. He would not think about his parents, about Matyas; would not think about Tibor, who had disappeared somewhere beyond the Austrian border. With Jozsef at his side he slept in the ruins of barns or dug into haystacks and bedded down in the sweet-smelling dark, then woke to nightmares of being buried alive. By night they walked in the thick brush beside a highway that led toward Budapest. One evening, when they stopped at the back door of a large country house to trade German cigarettes and batteries for eggs and bread, they learned from the cook that Russian tanks had entered Berlin. She showed them where they could conceal themselves in a stand of lilacs by an open window and listen to that night's radio broadcast. Amid the clusters of syringa they listened as a BBC announcer described the events transpiring in the German capital. To Andras the English words were a maze of sharp vowels and rapid-fire consonants, but Jozsef knew the language. The Russians, he translated, had surrounded the Reichstag, where Hitler had chosen to make his last stand; no one knew what was going on within.
One morning a few days later, as they slept in a boathouse on Lake Balaton beneath a mildewed canvas sail, they were awakened by the sound of bells. Every bell in the nearby town, Siofok, rang balefully, as though a great emergency were at hand.
Andras and Jozsef ran out of the boathouse to find the townspeople streaming into the streets, moving toward the center of town in a stunned procession. They followed the crowd to the town square, where the mayor--a war-starved grandfather in an ill-fitting Soviet jacket--climbed the steps of the courthouse and announced that the war in Europe was over. Hitler was dead. Germany had signed an agreement of unconditional surrender in Reims. A cease-fire would go into effect at midnight.
From the crowd, a single beat of silence; then they roared in celebration and threw their hats into the air. For that moment it didn't seem to matter that Hungary had been on the losing side, that its shining capital on the Danube had been bombed to rubble, that the country had fallen under Soviet control, that its people had nothing to eat, that its prisoners still hadn't returned, that its dead were gone forever. What mattered was that the war in Europe was over. Andras and Jozsef put their arms around each other and wept.
The hills east of Buda had come into their young leaves, insensate to the dead and the grieving. The flowering lindens and plane trees seemed almost obscene to Andras, inappropriate, like girls in transparent lawn dresses at a funeral. He and Jozsef hiked the ruined streets on the east side of Castle Hill; at the top they paused and stood looking out over the city in silence. The beautiful bridges of the Danube--Margaret Bridge, the Chain Bridge, the Elizabeth Bridge, all those bridges whose every inch Andras knew by heart, every one of them as far as he could see--lay in ruins, their steel cables and concrete supports melting into the sand-colored rush of the river. The Royal Palace had been bombed into the shape of a crumbling comb, a Roman lady's hair ornament excavated from an ancient city. The hotels on the far side of the river had fallen to ruins; they seemed to kneel on the riverbank in belated supplication.
In wordless shock, avoiding each other's eyes, Andras and Jozsef stumbled down through the streets of the old city toward the bridgeless river. They knew they had to cross, knew that whatever waited for them waited on the far bank, amid the remains of Pest. Near Ybl Miklos ter, the square named for the architect who had designed the Operahaz, they found a slip where a line of boatmen waited to ferry passengers across.
For their passage they traded their last six packages of cigarettes and a dozen large batteries. The boatman, a red-faced boy in a straw hat, looked exceptionally well fed. As the boat cut toward the opposite shore, the feeling in Andras's chest was like a hand raked through the tissue of his lungs; his diaphragm contracted with a spasm so painful he couldn't breathe. The boat, a leaking skiff, made a shaky downstream progress across the river, twice threatening to capsize before it delivered them sick and shaking to the shore of Pest. They climbed out onto the wet sand beneath the embankment, the water lapping their shoes. Then they ascended the stone steps and stared up into a corridor of ruined buildings. On either side, a few buildings stood intact; some had even retained the colored tiles of their decorative mosaics, the leaves and flowers of their Baroque ornamentation. But Andras and Jozsef's path toward the center of town led them through a museum of destruction: endless piles of bricks, splintered beams, shattered tiles, fractured concrete. The dead had been moved out of the street long before, but crosses stood on every corner. Signs of ordinary life presented themselves as if in total ignorance of this disaster: a clean shop window full of dough twisted into the usual shapes; a red bicycle reclining against a stoop; from far away, the improbable clang of a streetcar bell.
Farther along, the skeleton of a German plane protruded from the top story of a building.
A section of burned wing had fallen to the ground; the rust along its edges suggested it had lain there for months. A dog sniffed the blackened steel ribs of the wing and trotted off down the street.
They went along together toward Nefelejcs utca, toward the buildings where their families had lived--the building where Jozsef had said goodbye to his mother and grandmother; the building where Tibor and Ilana had moved after Andras's return; the building where Andras and Klara had crouched together on the bathroom floor the night before his departure. They turned the corner from Thokoly ut and passed the familiar greengrocer's, empty of green, and the familiar sweet shop, empty of sweets. At the corner of Nefelejcs utca and Istvan ut was a pile of wreckage, a mountain of plaster and stone and wood and brick and tile. Across the street, where Jozsef's family and Tibor and Ilana had lived, there was nothing at all. Not even a ruin. Andras stood and
Later he would say of himself, "That was when I lost my head." It was the closest he could come to describing the feeling: His head had departed from his body, had been sent, like the evacuated children of Europe, somewhere dull and distant and safe. His body went to its knees in the street. He wanted to tear his clothing but found he couldn't move. He wouldn't listen to Jozsef, wouldn't consider that his wife and child, or children, might have left the building before it had been destroyed. He couldn't see anyone or anything. Passersby moved around him as he knelt on the pavement.
He might have stayed there an hour, or two, or five. Jozsef seated himself on an upturned cinderblock and waited. Andras was aware of him as a kind of fine tether, a monofilament connecting him, against his will, to what was left of the world. His eyes, unfocused on the ruin of the building, filled and drained and filled again. And then a familiar sound resolved from the nebula of his dulled senses: the sound of delicate hooves on pavement, the jingle of twin bells. The sound approached until it reached him, then went still. He raised his eyes.
It was the tiny grandmother of Klein, and her goat cart, newly painted white.
"My God," she said, and stared at him. "Is it Andras? Is it Andras Levi?"
He took her hand and kissed it. "You remember me," he said. "Thank God. Do you know anything about my wife? Klara Levi? Do you remember her, too?"