Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

For a few blocks, as Andras walked toward home, he felt inclined to tap-dance himself. Chance favored him at times; it had delivered the unexpected furlough, and now it had delivered Mátyás. But not even that welcome surprise could divert his mind from its new channel of worry. The newspaper he’d bought that afternoon had delivered a sobering view of events in the east: Kiev had fallen to the Germans, and Hitler’s armies lay within a hundred miles of Leningrad and Moscow. In a radio address earlier that week, the Führer had proclaimed the imminent capitulation of the Soviet Union. Andras feared that the British, who had held out fiercely in the Mediterranean, would lose hope now; if their defenses crumbled, Hitler would rule all of Europe. He thought of Rosen at the Blue Dove three years earlier, declaring that Hitler wanted to make a Germany of the world. Not even Rosen could have predicted the degree to which that speculation would prove true. German territory had spread across the map of Europe like spilled ink. And the people of the conquered countries had been turned from their homes, deported to wastelands or clapped into ghettoes or sent to labor camps. He wanted to believe that Hungary might remain a refuge at the center of the firestorm; it was easier to believe such a thing here in Budapest, far from the heat and stink of Bánhida Camp. But if Russia were to fall, no country in Europe would be safe, particularly not for Jews-certainly not Hungary, where the Arrow Cross had gained strength in every recent election. Into this baffling uncertainty, Andras and Klara’s child would be born. He began to understand how his own parents must have felt when his mother had become pregnant with him during the Great War, though the situation had been different then: His father had been a Hungarian soldier, not a forced laborer, and there had been no crazed Führer dreaming of a Jew-free Europe.

At home he found Klara and Ilana sitting at the kitchen table and laughing over some intimacy, Ilana’s hands clasped in Klara’s own. It was clear to him, even at first glance, that the connection between them had deepened in his absence; in her letters Klara had often mentioned how grateful she was for Ilana’s companionship, and he’d been relieved to know that they lived just a few blocks from each other and crossed the distance often. If Klara had been Ilana’s confidante and protector in Paris, now she seemed to have become something like an older sister. Soon after Ilana had arrived in Budapest, Klara had told him, they’d begun a ritual of going to the market together every Monday and Thursday morning. When Tibor had gone to the Munkaszolgálat, Klara had seen to it that Ilana wasn’t lonely; they cooked together, spent evenings with Klara’s records or Ilana’s books, strolled the boulevards and parks on Sunday afternoons. That particular night, just before Andras had arrived, Ilana had delivered a piece of sweet and complicated news: She was pregnant. She repeated the news now in her tentative Hungarian. It had happened while Tibor was home on his last furlough. If all went well, the babies would be born two months apart. She’d written to Tibor and received a letter assuring her that he was well, that his labor company was far from the dangerous action farther east, that the summer weather had made everything more bearable, that her news had made him happier than he’d believed he could be.

But there was no happiness that fall of 1941 that wasn’t complicated by worry. Andras could see it in the narrow lines that had gathered on Ilana’s brow. He knew what this pregnancy must mean to her after her miscarriage, and how terrified she would be for the baby’s safety even if they weren’t in the midst of a war. He would have embraced her if her observance hadn’t forbidden it. As it was, he had to be content to congratulate her and express his fervent wish that all would go well. Then he told the two of them how he had run into Mátyás on the streetcar.

“Well,” Klara said. “It’s a good thing I bought extra pastries for dessert. That young goat would eat us into starvation otherwise.”

Mátyás arrived just as Klara was setting out the pastries in the sitting room after dinner. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and plucked a cream-filled mille-feuille from the silver tray. For Ilana he had a deep bow and a flourish of his hat.

“Your romancing must have gone well,” Andras said. “Your cheeks are on fire with lipstick.”

“It’s not lipstick,” Mátyás said. “It’s the stain of breached innocence. Serafina is far too worldly for me. I’m still blushing from what she said when we parted.”

“We won’t ask what it was,” Klara said.

“I wouldn’t tell anyway,” he said, and winked. He looked around him at the furnishings of the sitting room. “What a place,” he said. “All of this just for the two of you!”

“For the three of us, soon,” Klara said.

“Of course. I nearly forgot. Andras is going to be a papa.”

“And so is Tibor,” Ilana said.

“Good God!” Mátyás said. “Is it true? Both of you?”

“It’s true,” Ilana said, and then pointed a teasing finger at him. “Now your anya and apa will want you to be married, too, just to complete the picture.”

“Not a chance,” Mátyás said, with another wink. He laid down a quick combination of syncopated steps across the parquet floor of the sitting room, then mock-fell over the back of the sofa and landed upright beside the low table. “Tell me I haven’t got talent,” he demanded, and knelt before Klara with his arms outstretched. “You should know, dancing mistress.”

“We don’t call that dancing where I come from,” Klara said, and smiled.

“How about this, then?” Mátyás got to his feet and executed a double-pirouette with his arms above his head. But at the end he lost his balance and had to catch himself on the mantel. He stood for a moment breathing hard, shaking his head as if to clear it of a gyrational ghost, and for the first time Andras noticed how exhausted and ravenous he looked. He took Mátyás by the shoulder and led him to one of the striped ivory chairs.

“Sit here for a while,” Andras said. “You’ll feel better when you get up.”

“Don’t you like my dancing?”

“Not at the moment, brother.”

Klara made a plate of pastries for Mátyás, and Andras poured him a glass of slivovitz. For a while they all sat together and talked as though there were no such thing as war or worry or the work service. Andras kept the dessert plates and coffee cups filled. Ilana blushed at the attention, protesting that it wasn’t right to allow herself to be waited upon by her husband’s brother. Andras thought he had never seen her look so beautiful. Her skin, like Klara’s, seemed lit from within. Her hair was hidden under the kerchief worn by observant married women, but the scarf she’d chosen was made of lilac-colored silk shot through with silver. When she laughed at Mátyás’s jokes, the black-brown depths of her eyes seemed to flare with intelligent light. It was astonishing to think that this was the same girl who had lain pale and terrified in a hospital bed in Paris, her lips whitening with pain as she woke from the anesthesia.

After they finished their coffee, Andras and Mátyás went out for a walk together in the mild September night. From Nefelejcs utca it was only a few blocks to the city park, where gold floodlights illuminated the Vajdahunyad Castle. The paths were full of pedestrians even at that hour; in the shadowy recesses of the castle walls they could see men and women moving against each other in imperfect privacy. Mátyás’s high spirits had quieted now that the two of them were alone. He crossed his arms over his chest as if he were cold in the warm breeze. His time in the Munkaszolgálat seemed to have sharpened him somehow; the planes of his face had become harder and more distinct. His high forehead and prominent cheekbones, so much like their mother’s, had begun to lend him a gravity that seemed at odds with his prankster wit.