Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“What we need, you and I,” he concluded, as he hung his hard hat in the foremen’s locker room, “is a nice cold glass of lager.”

“I’d be a fool to argue,” Andras said, and they set off together toward his father’s favorite beer hall, a cavelike establishment not far from Rózsa utca, with taxidermied wolves’ heads and deer antlers hanging on the walls and a giant old-fashioned barrel of beer on a wooden stand. At the tables, men smoked Fox cigarettes and argued about the fate of Europe. The bartender was an enormous mustachioed man who looked as though he subsisted on fried doughnuts and beer.

“How’s the lager today, Rudolf?” his father asked.

Rudolf gave him a small-toothed smile. “Gets you drunk,” he said.

It seemed to be a routine of theirs. The bartender filled two glasses and poured himself a shot of whiskey, and they toasted each other’s health.

“Who’s this skinny lad?” Rudolf asked.

“My middle boy, the architect.”

“Architect, eh?” Rudolf raised an eyebrow. “Build anything around here?”

“Not yet,” Andras said.

“Army service?”

“Munkaszolgálat.”

“That who’s starving you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was a huszár in the Great War, like your father. On the Serbian front. Nearly lost a leg at Varaždin. But the labor service, now, that’s a different story. Digging around in the muck all day, no excitement, no chance for glory, and a starvation diet on top of it.” He shook his head. “That’s no job for a smart boy like you. How much longer have you got?”

“Six months,” Andras said.

“Six months! That’s not so long. And good weather all the way. You’ll do fine. But have another round on me, just in case. Bottoms up. May we all cheat death a thousand times!”

They drank. Then Andras and his father retreated to their own table in a dark corner of the room, beneath a wolf head frozen in a howl. The head gave Andras a chill to the base of his spine. That winter in Transylvania he’d heard wolves howling at night, and had imagined their yellow teeth and silvered fur. There had been times when he’d felt so desperate he’d wanted to give himself up to them. As if to remind himself that he was home on furlough, he reached into his pocket and touched his father’s watch; he’d left it with Klara when he’d gone to the Munkaszolgálat. Now he took it out to show his father.

“It’s a good watch,” Béla said, turning it over in his fingers. “A great watch.”

“In Paris,” Andras said, “whenever I was in a bad spot, I used to take it out and think about what you might do.”

His father gave him a rueful smile. “I’ll bet you didn’t always do what I would have done.”

“Not always,” Andras said.

“You’re a good boy,” his father said. “A thoughtful boy. You’re always putting on a brave face in your letters from the Musz, to keep your mother’s spirits up. But I know it’s much worse than you let on. Look at you. They’ve half killed you.”

“It’s not so bad,” Andras said, feeling as he said it that it was true. It was just work, after all; he’d worked all his life. “We’ve been fed,” he said. “They give us clothes and boots. We have a roof over our heads.”

“But you’ve had to leave school. I think about that every day.”

“I’ll go back,” he said.

“To where? France doesn’t exist anymore, not as a place for Jews. And this country…” He shook his head in dismay and disgust. “But you’ll find a way to finish. You’ve got to. I don’t want to see you abandoning your studies.”

Andras understood what he was thinking. “You didn’t abandon your studies,” he said. “You left Prague because you had to.”

“But I didn’t go back, did I?”

“You didn’t have much of a choice.” He couldn’t see any point in continuing the line of conversation; he was powerless to do anything about school now, and his father knew it as well as he did. The thought that it had been almost two years since he’d been at the École Spéciale made him feel pressed under a great and immovable weight. He looked up at a cluster of men who were going over the sports page in the Pesti Hírlap, arguing over which wrestler would win a tournament at the National Sports Club that night. He had never heard any of the wrestlers’ names before.

“It’s good to see Klara, I’m sure,” his father said. “It’s hard to be away from your wife for so long. She’s a nice girl, your Klara.” But there was an echo of the look Andras had seen on his mother’s face earlier, a shadow of hesitation, of reserve.

“I wish you’d written to tell her you were moving,” Andras said. “She would have come out to help you.”

“Your mother’s kitchen girl helped. She was glad to have the extra work.”

“Klara’s our family, Apa.”

His father pushed his lips out and shrugged. “Why should we trouble her with our problems?”

Andras wasn’t going to say what had occurred to him as his father had narrated their story: that he wished Klara might have been the one to negotiate the sale of the lumberyard, that he was certain she would have insisted on a better price and gotten it. But such a negotiation, which might have taken place in Paris without raising the slightest notice, would have been unthinkable in Konyár; here on the Hajdú plains, women did not haggle over real estate with men. “Klara’s no stranger to hard work,” Andras said. “She’s had to support herself since she was sixteen. And in any case, she thinks of you and Anya as her own parents.”

“Now that’s a quaint notion,” Béla said, and shook his head. “Don’t forget, my boy, that we celebrated your wedding at her mother’s house. I’ve met Mrs. Hász. I’ve met Klara’s brother. I don’t think Klara could ever mistake us for her own family.”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re pretending not to understand me.”

“In Paris, maybe you and Klara were just two Hungarians keeping each other company,” Béla said. “Here at home, things are different. Look around you. The rich don’t sit down with the poor.”

“She’s not the rich, Apa. She’s my wife.”

“Her family bought out that nephew of hers. He didn’t have to break his back in the work service. But they didn’t do the same for you.”

“I told her brother I wouldn’t consider it.”

“And he didn’t argue, did he?”

Andras felt the back of his neck grow warm; a flash of anger moved through him. “It’s not fair of you to hold that against Klara,” he said.

“What’s unfair is that some should have to work while others don’t.”

“I didn’t come here to argue with you.”

“Let’s not argue, then.”

But it was too late. Andras was furious. He didn’t want to be in his father’s presence a moment longer. He put money on the table for the beer, but his father pushed it away.

“I’m going for a walk,” Andras said, getting to his feet. “I need some air.”

“Well, let your old father walk with you.”

He couldn’t conceive of a way to say no. His father followed him out of the bar and they walked together in the blue light of evening. All along the avenue, yellow streetlamps had come on to illuminate the buildings with their flaking plaster and faded paint. He didn’t think about where he was walking; he wished he could walk faster, lose his father in the dusk, but the fact was that he was exhausted, anemic, and in need of sleep. He pressed onward past the Aranybika Hotel, an aging dowager in white wooden lace; he walked past the double towers of the Lutheran church with its stolid spires. He kept walking, head down, all the way to the park across the street from the Déri Museum, a squat Baroque-style building clad in yellow stucco. The April evening, soft at the edges, reminded him of a thousand evenings he’d spent here as a schoolboy, with friends or alone, worrying the edges of his adolescent problems like the pages of favorite books. In those days he could always console himself with thoughts of home, of that patch of land in Konyár with its orchard and barn and lumberyard and millpond. Now his home in Konyár would never be his home again. His past, his earliest childhood, had been stolen from him. And his future, the life he had imagined when he was a student here, had been stolen too. He sat on a bench and bent over his knees, his head in his hands; the hurt and dislocation he’d suffered for eighteen months seemed to come over him all at once, and he found himself choking out hoarse sobs into the night.