Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“I think it’s a kind of final test,” Klara said, and smiled.

“I hope you pass,” he said.

“You don’t seem confident.”

“Of course I’m confident.”

“Go get your father,” she said, and pushed him toward the door.

By the time he and Mendel returned with Lucky Béla, there were matzo balls boiling in a pot on the stove. The gefilte fish was finished, the table laid with a white cloth, the plates and silverware gleaming in the light of two white tapers. At the center of the table was a silver seder plate, the one they’d used every year since Andras could remember, with greens and bitter herbs, salt water and charoset, egg and shank bone laid out in its six silver cups.

Lucky Béla stood beside his chair at the head of the table, silent with the news he’d received just before the boys had met him at work. In the foremen’s office he’d heard it come in on the radio: Horthy had decided to let Hitler invade Yugoslavia from Hungarian soil-Yugoslavia, with whom Hungary had signed an agreement of peace and friendship a year before. Nazi troops had gathered at Barcs and swarmed across the Drava River while Luftwaffe bombers decimated Belgrade. Béla knew what it was all about: Hitler was punishing the country for the military coup and the popular uprising that had followed Yugoslavia’s entry into the Tripartite Pact. Not a week earlier, Germany had pledged to guarantee the borders of Yugoslavia for a thousand years; now Hitler had set his armies against it. The invasion had begun that afternoon. Hungarian troops would be sent to Belgrade later that week to support the German Army. It would be Hungary’s first military action in the European conflict. It seemed clear to Béla that this was only the beginning, that Hungary could not avoid being drawn further into the war. Thousands of boys would lose their lives. His children would be sent to work on the front lines. He had listened to the news and let it sink into his bones, but when Andras and Mendel had arrived he’d kept it from them. Nor would he say anything now, in the presence of this sacred-looking table. He couldn’t bear the thought that the news might ruin what his wife and his son’s wife had created. He led the seder as usual, feeling the absence of his youngest and eldest sons as a sharp constriction in his chest. He retold the story of the exodus and let Mendel recite the Four Questions. He managed to eat the familiar meal, with the boiled egg on greens and the fresh gefilte fish and the matzo balls in their gold broth. He sang the blessings afterward as he always did, and was grateful for the fourth ceremonial glass of wine. When he opened the door at the end of the seder to give the prophet Elijah his welcome, he saw open doors all around the courtyard. It was a comfort to know he was surrounded by other Jews. But he couldn’t keep the news at bay forever. From the courtyard came the gritty sound of the national news station; someone downstairs had put a radio in the window so others could hear. A man was making a speech in a grave aristocratic voice: It was Miklós Horthy, their regent, mobilizing the country toward its glorious destiny within the new Europe. Béla could see the understanding come over his wife’s face, then his son’s. Hungary was involved now, irrevocably so. As they crowded out onto the balcony to listen to the broadcast, Béla pushed the door open a few more centimeters. Eliahu ha Navi, he sang, under his breath. Eliahu ha Tishbi. He stood with one hand on the doorframe, intoning the holy man’s name; he had not yet given up hope for a different kind of prophecy.

WHEN ANDRAS AND MENDEL reported to the battalion office at the end of their furlough, they learned that they would not rejoin the 112/30th in Transylvania. Major Kálozi, they were told by the battalion secretary, had had enough of them. Instead they would be deployed at Bánhida, fifty kilometers northwest of Budapest, where they would join Company 101/18 at a coal mine and power plant.

Fifty kilometers from Budapest! It was conceivable that he might be able to see Klara on a weekend furlough. And the mail might not take a month to travel between them. He and Mendel were sent to wait for the returning members of their new company at the rail yard, where they were divided into work groups and assigned to a passenger carriage. The men returning to Bánhida seemed to have passed an easier winter than Andras and Mendel had. Their clothes were intact, their bodies solid-looking. Between them there was a casual jocularity, as though they were schoolmates returning to gimnázium after a holiday. As the train moved east through the green rolling hills of Buda, then into the wooded and cultivated country beyond, the passenger car filled with the earthy smell of spring. But the workers’ conversation grew quieter the closer they got to Bánhida. Their eyes seemed to take on a sober cast, their shoulders an invisible weight. The greenery began to fall away outside the window, replaced at first by the low, desperate-looking habitations that always seemed to precede a train’s arrival into a town, and then by the town itself with its twisting veinery of streets and its red-roofed houses, and then, as they passed through the railway station and moved toward the power plant, by an increasingly unlovely prospect of hard-packed dirt roads and warehouses and machine shops. Finally they came into view of the plant itself, a battleship with three smokestacks sending plumes of auburn smoke into the blue spring sky. The train shrieked to a halt in a rail yard choked with hundreds of rusted boxcars. Across a barren field were rows of cinderblock barracks behind a chain-link fence. Farther off still, men pushed small coal trolleys toward the power plant. Not a single tree or shrub interrupted the view of trampled mud. In the distance, like a sweet-voiced taunt, rose the cool green hills of the Gerecse and Vertes ranges.

Guards threw open the doors of the railcars and shouted the men off the train. In the barren field the new arrivals were separated from the returnees; the returnees were sent off to work at once. The rest of the men were ordered to deposit their knapsacks at their assigned barracks and then to report to the assembly ground at the center of the compound. The cinderblock barracks at Bánhida looked to have been built without any consideration besides economy; the materials were cheap, the windows high and small and few. As he entered, Andras had the sensation of being buried underground. He and Mendel claimed bunks at the end of one of the rows, a spot that afforded the privacy of a wall. Then they followed their mates out to the assembly ground, a vast quadrangle carpeted in mud.

Two sergeants lined the men up in rows of ten; that day there were fifty new arrivals at Bánhida Camp. They were ordered to stand at attention and wait for Major Barna, the company commander, who would inspect them. Then they would be divided into work groups and their new service would begin. They stood in the mud for nearly an hour, silent, listening to the far-off commands of work foremen and the electric throb of the power plant and the sound of metal wheels on rails. At last the new commander emerged from an administrative building, his cap trimmed with gold braid, a pair of high glossy boots on his feet. He walked the rows briskly, scanning the men’s faces. Andras thought he resembled a schoolbook illustration of Napoleon; he was dark-haired, compact, with an erect bearing and an imperious look. On his second pass through Andras’s line, he paused in front of Andras and asked him to state his position.

Andras saluted. “Squad captain, sir.”

“What was that?”

“Squad captain,” Andras said again, this time at a higher volume. Sometimes the commanders wanted the men to shout their responses, as if this were the real military and not just the work service. Andras found these episodes particularly depressing. Now Major Barna ordered him to step out of the ranks and march to the front.