The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
A Fire in the Snow
THE DAY AFTER the air raid, work on the Turka--Skhidnytsya highway came to a temporary halt. All the Hungarian labor companies in the area were sent to the officers'
training school to repair the damage. The bombed buildings had to be rebuilt, the torn-up roads repaired. General Vilmos Nagy was still in residence; he couldn't go on to Hitler's headquarters in Vinnitsa until it could be determined that the way was safe. Major Kozma, energized by Nagy's presence but not yet appraised of his unconventional political views, took the opportunity to arrange a work circus for his entertainment. The broken bricks and splintered timbers of the officers' dining hall were supposed to be hauled away by horse cart, but there were more carts than there were horses to fill the traces; the stables, too, had suffered in the raid. So Kozma put his men into the traces instead. Eight forced laborers, Andras and Jozsef among them, were lashed in with leather harness straps and made to pull cartloads of detritus from the ruined mess hall to the assembly ground, which had become a salvage yard for building materials. The distance could not have been more than three hundred meters, but the cart was always loaded to overflowing. The men moved as if through a lake of hardening cement. When they fell to their knees in exhaustion, the guards climbed down from the driver's bench and laid into them with whips. A group of officer trainees had stopped their own work to watch the spectacle. They booed when the men fell to their knees, and applauded when Andras and Jozsef and the others struggled to their feet again and dragged the cart a few meters farther toward the unloading area.
By midmorning the spectacle had generated enough talk to come to the attention of Nagy himself. Against the protests of his young adjutant he emerged from the bunker where he'd taken shelter and marched across the assembly ground to the ruin of the mess hall. With his thumbs hooked into his belt, he paused to watch the work servicemen toss debris into the bed of the cart and draw it forward. The general walked from cart bed to harness line, running his hand along the leather straps that connected the men to the traces. Kozma hustled across the mess-hall ruin and positioned himself close to the general. He pulled himself up to his full height and snapped a hand to his forehead.
The general didn't return the salute. "Why are these men harnessed to the wagon?"
he asked Kozma.
"They're the best horses we've got," Kozma said, and winked his good eye.
The general removed his glasses. He was a long time cleaning them with his handkerchief, and then he put them on and gave Kozma a cool stare. "Cut your men loose," he said. "All of them."
Kozma looked disappointed, but he raised a hand to signal one of the guards.
"Not him," the general said. "You do it."
The words sent a shock of energy through the line of harnessed men, a frisson Andras felt through the leather straps at his chest and shoulders.
"At once, Major," Nagy said. "I don't like to repeat an order."
And Kozma had to go to each man and cut the leather straps with his pocketknife, which required him to get closer to them than he'd gotten since they had first come under his command--close enough to smell them, Andras thought, close enough to put himself in danger of catching their chronic cough, their body lice. The major's hands trembled as he fumbled with the interlaced straps. It took him a quarter of an hour to free the eight of them. The officer-trainees who had stopped to watch had disappeared now.
"Have your guards bring a truckload of wheelbarrows from the supply warehouse," the general ordered Kozma. To the men he said, "You will rest here until the wheelbarrows arrive. Then you will remove the debris by the barrow-load." He watched as the work foremen broke the men into their groups as they waited for the carts. Kozma stood silent at the general's side, twisting and twisting his hands as if he meant to shuck them of their skins. The general seemed to have forgotten that his life was in danger, that the NKVD was aware of his presence at the camp. He paid no attention to his adjutant's urgent request that he return to the bunker. At lunchtime, Nagy and the adjutant escorted the men to the new mess tent and saw that they received an extra twenty decagrams of bread and ten grams of margarine. The general had his adjutant drag a bench over to the patch of bare earth where the work servicemen were eating; he took his lunch with them, asking questions about their lives before the war and what they planned to do when it was over. The men responded tentatively at first, uncertain whether or not to trust this exalted person in his decorated jacket, but before long they began to speak more freely. Andras didn't speak; he hovered at the edge of the group, aware that he was witnessing something extraordinary.
After lunch, the general ordered that the men of the 79/6th be deloused and bathed and given clean uniforms from the storehouses of the officers' training school. They were to be examined by the medics at the school infirmary, their wounds and illnesses treated.
Then they were to be reassigned to jobs that would allow them to recover their health. It was clear that they were too weak and sick to perform hard labor. For the rest of the day he sent them to work in the damp heat of the mess tent, where the cook set them to peeling potatoes and cutting onions for the officers' dinner.
At dinnertime the men received another supplemental ration: twenty decagrams of bread again, and ten more grams of margarine. An unfamiliar officer, a tall ursine man who introduced himself to them as Major Balint, announced that the supplement was to be permanent; the general had ordered that the men's diet be altered. For the time being they would continue to serve in the mess tent rather than return to their work on the road.
And there was to be another change: Balint himself would be their new commander.
Major Kozma would no longer have anything to do with the 79/6th, nor, if General Nagy had anything to say about it, with any other Munkaszolgalat company, except perhaps the one in which he would be forced to serve.
Not once since their arrival at Turka had there been a night at the orphanage that might have been called festive. Even when they'd observed the High Holidays they had done so with a sense of mournful duty, and an awareness of how far they were from everything and everyone they loved. That night at the barracks, at an hour when Kozma might ordinarily have lined them up outside and made them stand at attention until they fell to their knees, the men gathered in one of the downstairs classrooms to play cards and sing nonsense songs and read the news aloud from scraps of newspaper gleaned from the officers' training school. The Soviets, the Ivory Tower read, continued to hold off the Nazi offensive at Stalingrad as the battle entered its eleventh week; bitter fighting continued on the streets of the city and in the northern suburbs, raising speculation that the Nazis might find themselves still entrenched in that fight when the Russian winter arrived. "Let them freeze!" the Ivory Tower cried, and crowned himself with a nautical hat Andras had folded from a page of advertisements. He grabbed Andras by the arms and made him dance a peasant dance. "We're free, my darlings, free," he sang, whirling him around the room. It wasn't true, of course; Lukas and the other guards still kept watch at the door, and any member of the 79/6th could have been shot for walking down the road unaccompanied. But they had indeed been freed from Major Kozma. And as if that weren't enough, they were clean and free of lice. General Nagy had gone so far as to order that their mattresses and blankets be dragged outside, burned, and replaced immediately with new bedding.
That night, from the fragrant comfort of a mattress stuffed with sweet hay, Andras wrote to Klara. Dear K, There has been a surprising turn of events. Our circumstances in T. have changed for the better. We are well, and have just received new uniforms and a good work assignment. You must not worry on our account. If an opportunity arises for you to go to the country again, you must go. I'll follow as soon as I can. Unfortunately, I must confirm what you seem to have guessed about M.H. Please send love to my brother and Ilana. Kiss Tamas for me. As ever, your devoted A.
The next day, as he served lunch to the officer-trainees and their s
Without a sign or a wink or any other acknowledgment, Erdo moved down the serving line; Andras saw a flash of white as he transferred the note from his hand to his trouser pocket. As long as the mail kept moving between Ukraine and Hungary, Klara would know that Andras was well and that he wanted her to go to Palestine if she could.
General Nagy's plan for the rehabilitation of the 79/6th continued through the middle of November. The sick men were treated at the infirmary, and those who could still work gained weight on the extra rations. It helped that they had been assigned to kitchen duty. Though the cooks kept the food supply under careful watch, it was often possible to glean a stray carrot or potato or an extra measure of soup. If Andras missed his long walks to the end of the road with the surveyor, he had the pleasure of Szolomon's weekly visits to the officers' training school. The surveyor brought news of the war, and, when he could, slipped Andras and Jozsef some Ukrainian delicacy or a piece of warm clothing. One chilly afternoon Andras watched Jozsef tear open a paper-wrapped package of the rolled dumplings called holushky--little ears--and felt he was watching his own ravenous self in Paris, unwrapping a poppyseed roll sent by the elder Mrs. Hasz. What were they now, he and Jozsef, but a pair of hungry men on the ragged edge of a country at war, at the mercy of forces beyond their control? All the barriers between them, or at least all the markers of class that had seemed to separate them when they had lived in Paris, were arbitrary to the point of absurdity now. When Jozsef offered him the package of holushky, he took it and said koszonom. Jozsef sent him a look of surprised relief, a reaction that confused Andras until it occurred to him that this was the first time he'd spoken a kind word to Jozsef since Mendel's death. Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you involuntarily to forgive a person who didn't deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn't hate. It must have been the amnesiac effect of extremity, he thought, that bitter potion they ingested every day in Ukraine with their ration of soup and sandy bread.
One morning later that week, the men woke to find the courtyard of the orphanage blurred in a gray-white nimbus of snow. The clouds seemed intent upon giving up their contents all at once, the flakes speeding to earth in acorn-sized clusters. Here was the winter they'd dreaded, making its unambiguous entrance; the temperature had dropped twenty degrees overnight. At lineup, snow swarmed into their ears and mouths and noses.
It found its way into the crevices between their overcoats and neck wraps, worked itself in through the grommets of their boots. Major Balint took his place at the front of the assembly yard and announced with regret that the men had been removed from their duties at the officers' training school and assigned to snow removal. The guards unlocked the shed and handed the men their tools--the same pointed spades they'd used for road-building, not the curved rectangular blades that would have suited the job--and marched them out toward the village to begin their winter work.
That afternoon, when Szolomon found Andras and Jozsef among the snow-removal teams, he delivered the news that he'd been posted to a mapping office in Voronezh, and would depart on a military train that afternoon. He wished them a safe passage through the winter, said a blessing over their heads, and stuffed their pockets with long-unseen varieties of food--tins of meat and sardines, jars of pickled herring, bags of walnuts, dense rye biscuits. Then, without a word of goodbye, their reticent patron and protector hurried down the road and disappeared behind a veil of snow.
All week the temperature fell and fell, far below zero. Andras's back burned with the work; his hands wept with new blisters. Nothing he had done in the Munkaszolgalat was as hard as clearing that snow, day after day, as the cold deepened. But it was impossible to give up hope when there was always a chance that a letter might arrive from Budapest. Every time they went to clear snow from the roads at the officers' training school, Andras and Jozsef looked for Captain Erdo; whenever he had mail for them he found a way to slip it into their pockets. At the beginning of December a letter came from Gyorgy Hasz: The family fortunes had dwindled further still, and Gyorgy, Elza, and the elder Mrs. Hasz had been obliged to abandon the high-ceilinged flat on Andrassy ut and move in with Klara. But they must not worry. K was safe. Everyone was fine. They must concern themselves only with their own survival.
Klara's next missive brought the news that Tibor had been called back to the Munkaszolgalat and sent to the Eastern Front. Ilana and Adam had come to live on Nefelejcs utca along with everyone else. Now the seven of them were getting by on the money that had been intended for the trip to Palestine, which Klara's lawyer forwarded in small increments each month. Andras tried to imagine it: the bright rooms of the apartment filled with all the things the Hasz family had brought from Andrassy ut, the remaining rugs and armoires and bric-a-brac of their princely estate; Elza Hasz, a mourning dove in a morning dress, her wings folded at her sides; Klara and Ilana trying to keep the babies clean and calm and fed in the midst of a crowd; Klara's mother stoic and silent in her corner; the constant smell of potatoes and paprika; the flat blond light of Budapest in winter, falling indifferently through the tall windows. Absent from the letter was any mention of Matyas, of whom Andras thought constantly as blizzards abraded the hills and fields of Ukraine.
In mid-December a note came from Jozsef's mother: Gyorgy had been admitted to the hospital with a burning pain in his chest and a high fever. The diagnosis was an infection of the pericardium, the membrane that surrounded the heart. His doctor wanted him to be treated with colchicine, pericardiocentesis, and three weeks of rest on a cardiac ward. The cost of this medical disaster, nearly five thousand pengo, threatened to unhouse them all; Klara was trying to arrange to have her lawyer send the money.
Jozsef was downcast and silent all day after he'd received the letter. That night at the orphanage he didn't get into bed at the ordinary hour. Instead he stood at the window and stared down into the snowy depths of the courtyard, a coarse blanket wrapped around him like a dressing gown.
Andras rolled over on his bunk and propped himself up on an elbow. "What is it?"
he said. "Your father?"
Jozsef gave a nod. "He hates to be sick," he said. "Hates to be a burden to anyone.
He's miserable if he has to miss a day of work." He pulled the blanket closer and looked down into the courtyard. "Meanwhile I've done nothing at all with my life. Nothing of use to anyone, certainly not my parents. Never had a job. Never even been in love, or been loved by anyone. Not by any of those girls in Paris. No one in Budapest, either. Not even Zsofia, who was pregnant with my child."
"Zsofia's pregnant?" Andras said.
"Not anymore. Last spring. She got rid of it somehow. She didn't want it any more than I did, that was how little she cared for me." He released a long breath. "I can't imagine you'd have any sympathy for me, Andras. But it's a hard thing to have to see oneself clearly all of a sudden. You must understand what I mean."
Andras said he believed he did.
"I know you don't think much of my paintings," Jozsef said. "I could see it when you came by last year, the time you and Klara brought the baby to my flat."
"On the contrary, I thought the new work was good. I told Klara as much."
"What if I were to try to contact my art dealer in Budapest?" Jozsef said, turning to Andras. "Have him sell something? I never considered the new pieces to be finished, but a collector might think otherwise. I might ask Papp to see what he can get for those nine big pieces."
"You'd sell your unfinished work?"
"I can't imagine what else I can do," Jozsef said, turning from the window. For a moment the curve of his forehead and the dark wing of his hair were like Klara's, and Andras experienced an unwelcome jolt of affection for him. He lay back in bed and stared at
"The pieces I saw were good," he told Jozsef. "They didn't seem unfinished. They might fetch a high price. But it might not be necessary to sell them. Klara may be able to get the money sent from Vienna."
"And what if she can?" Jozsef said. "Do you think they won't need more money for something else next month? What if one of the children gets sick, or my grandmother? What if it's something that can't wait for Klara to contact her lawyer?" The question hovered in the air for a long moment while they both considered that frightening possibility.
"What can I tell you?" Andras said. "I think it's a fine idea. If I had work to sell right now, I'd sell it."
"Give me your pen," Jozsef said. "I'll write my mother. Then I'll write to Papp."
Andras felt around in his knapsack for his pen and the last precious bottle of India ink left over from their set-design supplies. Using the windowsill as a desk and the moonlight as a lamp, Jozsef began to write. But a moment later he spoke again into the dark.
"I've never given my father a single thing," he said. "Not one thing."
"He'll know what it means for you to sell those paintings."
"What if he dies before my mother gets this letter?"