Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“You ought to have telephoned me,” Klara said. “I would have come to help you move.”

His mother lowered her eyes. “We didn’t want to disturb you. We knew you were busy with your students.”

“You’re my family.”

“That’s kind of you,” Andras’s mother said, but there was a note of reserve in her voice, almost a hint of deference. The next moment Andras wondered if he’d only imagined it, because his mother had taken Klara’s arm and begun to lead her across the courtyard.

The apartment was small and bright, a three-room corner unit with French doors leading out onto the veranda. His mother had planted winter kale in terra-cotta pots; she boiled some of it for their lunch and served it to them with potatoes and eggs and red peppers, and Andras and Mendel took their vitamin pills and ate a few apples Klara had brought for them, each in its own square of green paper. As they ate, his mother told them the news of Mátyás and Tibor: Mátyás was stationed near Abaszéplak, where his labor company was building a bridge over the Torysa River. But that wasn’t all; before his conscription he’d created such a sensation at the Pineapple Club, dancing atop that piano in his white tie and tails, that the manager had offered him a two-year contract. In his letters he wrote that he was practicing, always practicing-working out steps in his mind while he and his mates built the Torysa Bridge, then keeping the poor fellows up at night while he danced the steps he’d worked out that day. By the time he got home, he said, he’d be tapping so fast they’d have to invent a new kind of music just to keep up with him.

Tibor, Andras’s mother told them, had joined a detachment of his labor-service battalion in Transylvania last November; his training in Modena had won him the job of company medic. His letters didn’t carry much news about his work-Andras’s mother suspected he didn’t want to horrify her-but he always told her what he was reading. At the moment it was Miklós Radnóti, a young Jewish poet from Budapest who’d been conscripted into the labor service last fall. Like Andras, Radnóti had lived in Paris for a time. Some of his poems-one about sitting with a Japanese doctor on the terrace of the Rotonde, another about indolent afternoons in the Jardin du Luxembourg-put Tibor in mind of the time he’d spent there. It was rumored that Radnóti’s battalion was serving not far from Tibor’s own; the thought had helped Tibor endure the winter.

To Andras it seemed a terrible and surreal luxury to sit in the kitchen of this clean sunny apartment while his mother delivered news of Mátyás and Tibor and their time in the labor service. How could he relax into this familiar chair, how could he eat apples with Klara and Mendel and listen to the bleating of white goats in the courtyard, while his brothers built bridges and treated sick men in Ruthenia and Transylvania? It was terrible to feel this sweet drowsiness, terrible to find himself anticipating an afternoon nap in his own childhood bed, if indeed his childhood bed had been brought here from Konyár. Even the table before him-the small yellow one from the outdoor summer kitchen-gave him a pang of displaced longing, as though he’d become the conduit of his brothers’ homesickness. This little table his father had built before Andras was born: He remembered sitting underneath it on a hot afternoon as his mother shelled peas for their dinner. He was eating a handful of peas as he watched an inchworm scale one of the table legs. He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with its tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now-that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive.

“What are you thinking of?” his mother asked, and pressed his hand.

“The summer kitchen.”

She laughed. “You recognized this table.”

“Of course.”

“Andras used to keep me company while I baked,” his mother told Klara. “He used to draw in the dirt with a stick. I used to sweep the rest of the kitchen every day, but I would sweep around his drawings.”

There was a soft hoarse intake of breath from Mendel; he hadn’t waited to find a comfortable place for a nap. He’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table, his head pillowed on his arms. Andras led Mendel to the sofa and covered him with a quilt. Mendel didn’t wake, not through the walk across the room, nor through the arrangement of his limbs upon the sofa. It was a talent he had. Sometimes he’d sleep all the way through the morning march to the work site.

“Will you sleep too?” Klara asked Andras. “I’ll help your mother.”

But the bright sharp taste of the apples had woken him; now he didn’t feel like sleeping. What he wanted, what he couldn’t wait another moment to do, was to find his father.

It was a piece of raw Hungarian irony that his father was employed in the milling of timber-some of it, perhaps, the very same timber that Andras had cut in the forests of Transylvania and Subcarpathia. Debrecen Consolidated Lumber bore no resemblance to the lumberyard Lucky Béla had sold to the hateful young man in Konyár. This was a large-scale government-funded operation that processed hundreds of trees daily, and turned out thousands of cords of lumber for use in the building of army barracks and storage facilities and railroad stations. For months now Hungary had been girding itself for war, anticipating that it might be forced to enter the conflict alongside Germany. If that were to happen, vast quantities of timber would be needed to support the army’s advance. Of course, if he’d had a choice, Lucky Béla would have preferred to work for a smaller company whose products were to be sold for peaceful purposes. But he knew how fortunate he was to have a job at all when so many Jews were out of work. And if Hungary went to war, even the smaller lumber companies would be drafted into government service. So he’d taken the job of second assistant foreman when the previous second assistant foreman had died of pneumonia that past winter. The first assistant foreman, a school friend of Béla’s, had offered him the job as a temporary measure, a way to see Béla through the lean winter months. For two months Béla had lived in Debrecen and gone home on weekends, leaving the care of his own mill to his foreman. When the school friend had offered the job on a permanent basis, Béla and Flóra had decided that the time had come to sell their tiny operation. They were getting older. The chores had become more difficult, their debt deeper. With the money from the sale, they could pay their creditors and rent a small apartment in Debrecen.

It was their bad luck that the only interested buyer had been a member of Hungary’s National Socialist Party, the Arrow Cross, and that the man’s offer was half of what the lumberyard was worth. Béla had no choice but to sell. It had been a hard winter. They’d had barely enough to eat, and for an entire month the trains had failed to come to Konyár. There had been a track failure that no one seemed inclined to fix. Certain normal processes-the delivery of mail, the restocking of provisions, the hauling away of milled lumber-had shut down altogether. But in Debrecen there was no food shortage, no slowdown at the mill. He would be paid twice what he could pay himself at his own lumberyard. It was a terrible shame to have had to sell at such a price, but the move had already done them good-Flóra had regained the weight she had lost during that long starved winter, and Béla’s cough and rheumatism had abated. His voice and gait were strong as he walked through the lumberyard with Andras, telling the story.