Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

He hated being told to march. He hated all of it. A few weeks at home had refreshed in him the dangerous awareness that he was a human being. When he reached the front of the lineup he stood at a tense and quivering attention while Major Barna looked him over. The man seemed to regard him with a kind of disgusted fascination, as if Andras were a freak in a traveling show. Then he pulled out a pearl-handled pocketknife and held it beneath Andras’s nose. Andras sniffed. He thought he might sneeze. He could smell the metal of the blade. He didn’t know what Barna meant to do. The mayor’s small dark eyes held a glint of mischief, as if he and Andras were meant to be co-conspirators in whatever was about to happen. With a wink he moved the knife away from Andras’s face and wedged its tip under the officer’s insignia on Andras’s overcoat, and with a few quick strokes he tore the patch from Andras’s chest. The patch fell into the mud; Barna pressed it down with his foot until it disappeared. Then he put a hand on Andras’s head, on the new cap Klara had given him. Another few strokes of the knife and he’d removed the officer’s insignia from the cap as well.

“What’s your rank now, Serviceman?” Major Barna shouted, loud enough for the men at the back to hear.

Andras had never heard of such a thing happening. He hadn’t known it was possible to be stripped of rank if you hadn’t been convicted of a crime. With a surge of daring, he pulled himself up to his full height-a good six inches taller than Barna-and shouted, “Squad captain, sir!”

There was a flash of movement from Barna, and an explosion of pain at the back of Andras’s skull. He fell to his hands and knees in the mud.

“Not at Bánhida,” Major Barna shouted. In his quivering hand he held a white beech walking-stick hazed with Andras’s blood. Despite the pain, Andras almost let out a laugh. It all seemed so absurd. Hadn’t he just been eating apples in his mother’s kitchen? Hadn’t he just been making love to his wife? He put a hand to the back of his head: warm blood, a painful lump.

“Get to your feet, Labor Serviceman,” the major shouted. “Rejoin ranks.”

He had no choice. Without another word, he complied.

His welcome to Bánhida was a taste of what was to come. Something had changed in the brief time Andras had been away from the Munkaszolgálat, or perhaps things were different in the 101/18th. There were no Jewish officers at any level; there were no Jewish medics or engineers or work foremen. The guards were crueler and shorter-tempered, the officers quicker to deliver punishment. Bánhida was an unabashedly ugly place. Everything about it seemed designed for the discomfort or the unhappiness of its inhabitants. Day and night the power plant let forth its three great billows of brown coal smoke; the air reeked of sulfur, and everything was filmed with a fine orange-brown dust that turned to a chalky paste in the rain. The barracks smelled of mildew, the windows let in heat but little light or air, and the roofs leaked onto the bunks. The paths and roads, it seemed, had been laid out to run through the wettest parts of camp. There was a downpour every afternoon promptly at three, turning the place into a treacherous mud-slick swamp. A hot wet breeze swept the smell of the latrines across the camp, and the men choked on the stench as they worked. Mosquitoes bred in the puddles and attacked the men, clustering on their foreheads and necks and arms. The flies were worse, though; their bites left tender red welts that were slow to heal.

Andras and Mendel had been assigned to shovel brown coal into mine carts and then to push the carts along rusted tracks to the power plant. The tracks were laid upon the ground but not fixed in place, and the reason for this soon became clear: as the rains increased, the tracks had to be taken up and redirected around puddles the size of small ponds. When there was no way to avoid the puddles, timbers had to be laid across them and the rails on top of those. The carts weighed hundreds of kilograms with their full loads. The men pulled and pushed and winched them, and when they still wouldn’t move, the men cursed and struck them with their shovels. Each truck was emblazoned with the white letters KMOF, for Közérdekű Munkaszolgálat Országos Felügyelője, the National Administration of the Labor-Service System; but Mendel insisted that the letters stood for Királyi Marhák Ostobasági Földbirtoka, the Royal Idiots’ Stupidity Farm.

There were things to be grateful for. It would have been worse if they’d had to work in the power plant, where the coal dust and chemical fumes turned the air into a thick unbreatheable stew. It would have been worse if they’d been sent down into the mines. It would have been worse to be there without each other. And it would have been worse to be hundreds of kilometers from Budapest, as they’d been in Ruthenia and Transylvania. At Bánhida the mail moved quickly. His parents’ letters took two weeks to arrive, and Klara’s came in a week. Once she enclosed a missive from Rosen, five pages of large loose script sent all the way from Palestine. He and Shalhevet had slipped out of France just before its borders were closed to emigrating Jews, and had been married in Jerusalem, where they were both working for the Palestine Jewish Community: Rosen in the department of settlement planning, and Shalhevet in the immigration advocacy office. They had a child on the way, due in November. There were even letters from Andras’s brothers: Tibor, home to spend his furlough with Ilana, had taken her to the top of Castle Hill for the first time; a photograph showed the two of them before a parapet, Ilana’s smile radiant, her hand enclosed in Tibor’s. Mátyás, still stuck in his labor-service company but struck with spring fever, had made a secret foray to a nearby town, where he had drunk beer, waltzed with girls at the local tavern, tap-danced on the zinc bar in his boots, and made it back to his battalion without getting caught.

In the face of the misery of Bánhida, Mendel conceived a new publication called The Biting Fly. Though at first it seemed to Andras an act of audacity verging on foolhardiness to revive the idea of a newspaper after what had happened in the 112/30th, Mendel argued that they had to do something to keep from going mad. The new publication, he said, would maintain a tone of protest while avoiding direct ridicule of the camp authorities. If they were caught, there would be nothing for their commander to take personally. There would be a certain degree of risk involved, of course, but the alternative was to allow themselves to be silenced by the Munkaszolgálat. After the humiliation Andras had suffered on the assembly ground, how could he refuse to raise his voice in protest?

In the end, Andras agreed to join Mendel again as co-publisher. His decision was driven in part by vanity, he suspected, and in part by desire to maintain his dignity; a greater part was the idea that he and Mendel were conspiring on behalf of free speech and their workmates’ morale. In the 112/30th he had seen how The Snow Goose had become an emblem of the men’s struggle. It had given them a certain relief to see their daily miseries recorded-to see them recognized as outrages that demanded the publication of an underground paper, even one as absurd as The Snow Goose. Here at Bánhida, at least, it would be easier to get drawing materials; there was a black market for all sorts of things. In addition to Debrecen sausages, Fox cigarettes, pinups of Hedy Lamarr and Rita Hayworth, cans of peas, woolen socks, tooth powder, and vodka, one could buy paper and drawing pencils. And there was plenty to illustrate. The first issue of The Biting Fly contained a lexicon that defined such terms as Morning Lineup (a popular parlor game involving alternating rounds of boredom, calisthenics, and humiliation), Water Carrier (a laborman with an empty bucket and a full mouth), and Sleep (a rare natural phenomenon about which little is known). There was a horoscope promising woe for every sign of the Zodiac. There was an advertisement for the services of a private detective who would let you know if your wife or girlfriend had been unfaithful, with a disclaimer releasing the detective from blame if a relationship should inadvertently develop between himself and the subject of his investigation. There were classified ads (Wanted: Arsenic. Will pay in installments) and a serialized adventure novel about a North Pole expedition, increasingly popular at the weather grew hotter. With the aid of a Jewish clerk in the supply office, the paper was printed in weekly editions of fifty copies. Before long Andras and Mendel began to enjoy a quiet journalistic fame among the camp inhabitants.