Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

In September a miracle occurred: Andras received a three-day furlough. There was no particular reason for that piece of luck, as far as he could determine; at Bánhida it seemed furloughs were granted at random except in the case of a death in the family. He learned of the furlough on a Thursday, received his papers on Friday, boarded a train to Budapest on Saturday morning. It was a luminous day, the air soft with the last radiant warmth of summer. The sky overhead burned a clear pale blue, and as they moved away from Bánhida the smell of sulfur faded into the sweet green smell of cut grass. Along the dirt roads that ran beside the tracks, farmers drove wagons heavy with hay and corn. The markets in Budapest would be full of squashes and apples and red cabbages, bell peppers and pears, late grapes, potatoes. It was astonishing to remember that such things still existed in the world-that they’d existed all along while he’d survived on a daily diet of coffee and thin soup and a couple hundred grams of sandy bread.

Klara was waiting for him at Keleti Station. He had never seen a woman so beautiful in all his life: She wore a dress of rose-colored jersey that grazed the swell of her belly, and a neat close-fitting hat of cinnamon wool. In continued defiance of the prevailing fashion, her hair was uncut and uncurled; she had looped it into a low chignon at the base of her neck. He folded her into his arms, breathing in the dusky smell of her skin. He was afraid to crush her against him as fiercely as he wanted to. He held her at arm’s length and looked at her.

“Is it true?” he said.

“As you can see.”

“But is it really?”

“I suppose we’ll find out in a few months.” She took his arm and led him from the station toward the Városliget. He could hardly believe it was possible to stroll through the September afternoon with Klara at his side, his work tools far away in Bánhida, nothing ahead of him but the prospect of pleasure and rest. Then, as they turned at István út and it became apparent that they were heading for her family’s house, he braced himself for the necessity of an interaction with her brother and sister-in-law and possibly even with József, who had rented an atelier in Buda so he could paint again. The absence of Andras’s officer’s insignia would have to be explained, his gauntness remarked over and regretted, and all that time he would have to look into the complacent and well-fed countenances of Klara’s relatives and feel the painful difference between their situation and his own. But when they reached the corner of István and Nefelejcs, Klara paused at the door of a gray stone building and took a key ring from her pocket. She held up an ornate key for Andras to admire. Then she fitted the key into the lock of the entry door, and the door swung inward to admit them.

“Where are we?” Andras asked.

“You’ll see.”

The courtyard was filled with courtyard things: bicycles and potted ferns and rows of tomato plants in wooden boxes. At the center there was a mossy fountain with lily pads and goldfish; a dark-haired girl sat at its edge, trailing her hand in the water. She looked up at Andras and Klara with serious eyes, then dried her hand on her skirt and ran to one of the ground-floor apartments. Klara led Andras to an open stairway with a vine-patterned railing, and they climbed three flights of shallow stairs. With a different key she opened a set of double doors and let him into an apartment overlooking the street. The place smelled of roasted chicken and fried potatoes. There were four brass coat hooks beside the door; an old homburg hat of Andras’s hung on one of them, and Klara’s gray coat on the other.

“This can’t be our apartment,” Andras said.

“Who else’s?”

“Impossible. It’s too fine.”

“You haven’t even seen it yet. Don’t judge it so quickly. You might find it not at all to your taste.”

But of course it was exactly to his taste. She knew perfectly well what he liked. There was a red-tiled kitchen, a bedroom for Andras and Klara, a tiny second bedroom that might be used as a nursery, a private bath with its own enameled tub. The sitting room was lined with bookshelves, which Klara had begun to fill with new books on ballet and music and architecture. There was a wooden drafting table in one corner, a distant Hungarian cousin of the one Klara had given Andras in Paris. A phonograph stood on a thin-legged taboret in another corner. At the far end of the room, a low sofa faced an inlaid wooden table. Two ivory-striped armchairs flanked the high windows with their view of the neo-Baroque apartment building across the street.

“It’s a home,” he said. “You made us a home.” And he took her into his arms.

What he wanted most during the short span of his furlough, he told Klara, was to be at liberty to see to his pregnant wife’s needs. She resisted at first, pointing out that he had no one to care for him at Bánhida. But he argued that to care for her would be a far greater luxury than to be cared for himself. And so, that first night home, after they’d eaten the roasted chicken and potatoes, she allowed him to make her coffee and read to her from the newspaper, and then to run a bath for her and bathe her with the large yellow sponge. Her pregnant body was a miraculous thing to him. A pink bloom had come out beneath the surface of her pale skin, and her hair seemed thicker and more lustrous. He washed it himself and pulled it forward to drape over her breasts. Her areolae had grown larger and darker, and a faint tawny line had emerged between her navel and her pubic triangle, transected by the silvery scar of her earlier pregnancy. Her bones no longer showed so starkly beneath the skin. Most notably, a complicated inward look had appeared in her eyes-such a deep commingling of sadness and expectancy that it was almost a relief when she closed them. As she lay back in the bathtub, cooling her arms against the enamel, he was struck by the fact that at Bánhida his life had been reduced to the simplest needs and emotions: the hope for a piece of carrot in his soup, the fear of the foreman’s anger, the desire for another fifteen minutes of sleep. For Klara, who had lived in greater security here in Budapest, there remained the opportunity for more complicated reflection. It was happening as he watched, as he bathed her with the yellow sponge.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said. “I can’t guess.”

She opened her gray eyes and turned to him. “How strange it is,” she said. “To be pregnant while we’re at war. If Hitler controls all of Europe, and perhaps Russia, too, who knows what may happen to this child? There’s no use pretending Horthy can keep us from harm.”

“Do you think we should try to emigrate?”

She sighed. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve even written to Elisabet. But the situation is as I expected. It’s almost impossible to get an entry visa now. Even if we could, I’m not certain I’d want to. Our families are here. I can’t imagine leaving my mother again, particularly now. And it’s hard to imagine starting another life in a strange country.”

“The travel, too,” he said, stroking her wet shoulders. “It’s hardly safe to cross an ocean during a war.”

Encircling her knees with her arms, she said, “It’s not just the war I’ve been thinking about. I’ve had all kinds of doubts.”

“What doubts?”

“About what sort of mother I’ll be to this child. About the hundred thousand ways I failed Elisabet.”

“You didn’t fail Elisabet. She turned out a strong and beautiful woman. And your situation was different then. You were alone, and you were just a child yourself.”

“And now I’m practically an old woman.”

“That’s nonsense, Klara.”