Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

But what The Biting Fly failed to provide was the one thing they all wanted most from a paper: real news of Budapest and the world. For that they had to rely on the few tattered copies of newspapers that had been sent by relatives or thrown out by the guards. Those papers would be passed around until they were unreadable and the news they contained had long ago gone stale. But there were some events of such great importance that they became known to the men not long after they occurred. In the third week of June, scarcely a year after France had fallen, Hitler’s troops invaded the Soviet Union along a twelve-hundred-kilometer front that ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Kremlin seemed just as shocked by that turn of events as the men of Bánhida Camp. It appeared that Moscow had believed Germany to be committed to its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. But Hitler, Mendel pointed out, must have been planning the attack for months. How else would he have mustered so many hundreds of thousands of troops, so many planes, so many panzer divisions? Not a week later, Andras and Mendel learned from the camp postmaster that Soviet planes-or what had appeared at first to be Soviet planes, but might have been German planes in disguise-had bombed the Magyar border town of Kassa. The message was clear: Hungary had no choice but to send its armies into Russia. If Prime Minister Bárdossy refused, Hungary would lose all the territories Germany had returned to it. In fact, Bárdossy, who had long opposed Hungary ’s entry into the war, now seemed to view it as inevitable. Soon the headlines trumpeted a declaration of war against the Soviet Union, and Hungarian Army units were on their way to join the Axis invasion. The men of the 101/18th knew what that meant: For every Hungarian unit sent to the front, a unit of labor servicemen would be sent to support it.

No one knew how long the war might go on, or what the labor servicemen might be called upon to do. In the barracks there were rumors that they would be used as human shields, or sent first across the lines to draw enemy fire. But at Bánhida there was no immediate change; the coal came out of the ground, the men loaded it into the carts, the power plant burned it, the sulfurous dust rose into the air. In July, when the mud dried up and the spring insects died of thirst, the pace of work seemed to grow more urgent, as if more power were needed to fuel the engines of war. The heat was so intense that the men stripped down to their underwear each day by noon. There were no trees to provide shelter from the sun, no swimming hole to cool their sunburned skin. Andras knew that cold raspberry-flavored seltzer existed not far off, in the town they’d passed en route to the camp, and on the hottest days he thought he might abandon his cart-damn the consequences-and walk until he reached the cool umbrella forest of a sidewalk café. He began to see shimmering mirages of water beside the tracks; at times the whole expanse of the camp floated atop a glittering silver-black sea. How long had it been since he’d seen the real sea, with its aquamarine swells and its icy-looking whitecaps? He could see it just beyond the chain-link fence as he pushed the carts of coal: the Mediterranean, a hammered copper-blue, stretching away toward the unimaginable shores of Africa. There was Klara in her black swimsuit, her white bathing cap with racing stripes, stepping into the foam at the water’s edge; Klara submerged to her thighs, her legs zigzagging into watery distortion. Klara on the wooden diving tower; Klara executing an Odettelike swan dive.

And then the foreman was at Andras’s side, shouting his orders. The coal had to be shoveled, the carts had to be moved, because somewhere to the east a war had to be fought.

The most stunning news of Andras’s life reached him on a still, hot evening in July, a month after Hungary had entered the war, in the dead hour between work and dinner, on the front steps of Barracks 21. He and two of his barracks-mates, a pair of lanky red-haired twins from Sopron, had gone to the office after work to get their letters and parcels. The men were blistered with sunburn, their eyes dazed from the brightness of the day; their sweat had turned the dust into a fine paste, which had dried into a thin crackling film on their skin. As ever, there was an interminable line at the post office. The mail was subject to inspection by the postmaster and his staff, which meant that every parcel had to be opened, inspected, and robbed of any food or cigarettes or money it might contain before its recipient could take away what was left. The Sopron twins chuckled over a recent copy of The Biting Fly as they waited. Andras’s mind was muffled with heat; he could scarcely remember illustrating that issue. He uncorked his canteen and drank the last few drops of water. If they had to wait in this line much longer, there wouldn’t be time to wash before dinner. Had he asked Klara to send him shaving soap? He envisioned a clean cake of it, wrapped in waxy white paper and printed with the image of a girl in an old-fashioned bathing costume. Or perhaps there would be something else, something less necessary but just as good: a box of violet pastilles, say, or a new photograph of Klara.

When they reached the window at last, the mail clerk put two identical packages into the twins’ hands. Each had been opened and inspected as usual, and the wrappers of four chocolate bars lay nested inside the packages like a taunt. But there must have been a surplus of baked goods in the mail that day: the parcels still contained identical tins of cinnamon rugelach. Miku and Samu were generous boys, and they admired Andras for his role in the creation of The Biting Fly; they waited for him while he retrieved a single thin envelope from Klara, and on the way back to the barracks they shared their bounty with him. Despite the comforts of cinnamon and sugar, Andras couldn’t help but feel disappointed with his own lean envelope. He was out of shaving soap and vitamins and a hundred other things. His wife might have thought about his needs. She might have sent him even a small package. While the twins went inside with their own parcels, he sat down on the steps and tore open the letter with his pocketknife.

From across the quadrangle, Mendel Horovitz saw Andras sitting on the barracks steps with a letter in his hands. He hurried across the yard, hoping to catch his friend before he went to the sinks to wash for dinner. Mendel had just come from the supply office, where the clerk had allowed him to use the typewriter; in a mere forty-five minutes he’d managed to type all six pages of the new Biting Fly. He thought there might still be time for Andras to begin the illustrations that evening. He whistled a tune from Tin Pan Alley, the movie he’d seen while in Budapest on furlough. But when he reached the barracks steps he stopped and fell silent. Andras had raised his eyes to Mendel, the letter trembling in his hand.

“What is it, Parisi?” Mendel said.

Andras couldn’t speak; he thought he might never speak again. Perhaps he had failed to understand. But he looked at the letter again, and there were the words in Klara’s neat slanted script.

She was pregnant. He, Andras Lévi, was going to be a father.

What did it matter now how many tons of coal he had to shovel? Who cared how many times the cart tipped from its unstable rails, how many times his blisters broke and bled, how brutally the guards abused him? What did it matter how hungry or thirsty he was, or how little sleep he got, or how long he had to stand in the quadrangle for lineup? What did he care for his own body? Fifty miles away in Budapest, Klara was pregnant with his child. All that mattered was that he survive the months between now and the date she’d projected in her letter-the twenty-ninth of December. By then he would have fulfilled his two years of military service. The war might even be finished, depending upon the outcome of Hitler’s campaign in Russia. Who knew what life might be like for Jews in Hungary then, but if Horthy was still regent it might not be an impossible place to live. Or maybe they would emigrate to America, to the dirty and glamorous city of New York. The day he got Klara’s letter he drew a calendar on the back of a copy of The Biting Fly. At the end of each workday he crossed off a square, and gradually the days began to queue up into a long succession of Xs. Letters flew between Budapest and Bánhida: Klara was still teaching private students, would continue to teach as long as she could demonstrate the steps. She was putting money away so they might rent a larger apartment when Andras came home. A friend of her mother’s owned a building on Nefelejcs utca; the neighborhood wasn’t fashionable, but the building was close to the house on Benczúr utca and only a few blocks from the city park. Nefelejcs was the name of the tiny blue flower that grew in the woods, the one with the infinitesimal yellow ring at its center: forget-me-not. He couldn’t, of course, not for a moment; his life seemed balanced on the edge of an unimaginable change.