Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“I am a Jew,” Novak said. “That was why I hired you in Paris. You were my brother.”

“I’m sorry, Novak-úr,” Andras said. “I’m sorry. I never meant you any harm. You were always kind to me.”

“It’s not your fault,” Novak said. “I’m glad you came here. At least this way we can take leave of each other.”

Andras rose and put on his military cap. Novak extended his hand across the desk, and Andras took it. There was nothing more to do except bid each other farewell. They did it in few words, and then Andras left the office and pulled the door closed behind him.

THAT EVENING, when he returned home to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca, he told Klara nothing of what had passed between him and her brother; nor did he mention that he had seen Novak. He said only that he’d been on a long walk around the city, that he had been thinking about what he might do when he returned from the service. He knew she’d taken note of his anxious distraction, but she didn’t ask him to explain his mood. The fact that he was going back to Bánhida the next day must have seemed explanation enough. They ate a quiet dinner in the kitchen, their chairs close together at the little table. Afterward, in the sitting room, they listened to Sibelius on the phonograph and watched the fire burning in the grate. Andras wore a flannel robe Klara had bought for him, and a pair of lambswool slippers. He couldn’t have imagined a setting more replete with comfort, but soon he’d be gone and Klara would be alone again to face whatever might come. The more comfortable he felt, the more contented and drowsy Klara looked as she lay back against the sofa cushions, the more painful it was to imagine what lay on the other side. György was right, he thought, to have protected Klara from the knowledge of what had happened. Her tranquility seemed worth his own dishonesty. She was utterly serene as she spoke of the changes pregnancy had brought about in her body, and of the comfort of being able to talk to her mother about them. She was tender with Andras, physically affectionate; she wanted to make love, and he was happy for the distraction. But when they were in bed, her body surprising in its new balance, he had to turn his face away. He was afraid she would sense he was keeping something from her, and would demand to know what it was.

Once he was back at Bánhida he was spared that danger, at least. He had never been so glad to have to do heavy work. He could numb his mind with the endless loading of brown coal into dusty carts, the endless pulling and pushing of the carts along the tracks. He could stun his limbs with calisthenics in the evening lineup, could submit to the drudgery of chores-the cleaning of barracks, the cutting of firewood, the hauling away of kitchen garbage-in the hope that the exhaustion would allow him to fall asleep at once, before his mind opened its kit bag of worries and began to display them in graphic detail, one after the next. Even if he managed to avoid that grim parade, he was at the mercy of his dreams. In the one that recurred most frequently, he would come upon Ilana lying in the hospital in a place that wasn’t quite Paris but wasn’t Budapest either, on the brink of death; then it wasn’t Ilana but Klara, and he knew he had to give his blood to her, but he couldn’t figure out how to transfer it from his own veins into hers. He stood at her bedside with a scalpel in his hand, and she lay in bed pale and terrified, and he thought he must first press the scalpel to his wrist and then think of a solution. Night after night he woke in the dark among the coughs and snores of his squad-mates, certain that Klara had died and that he had done nothing to save her. His sole consolation was that his term of service would end on December fifteenth, two weeks before she was due. He knew that it was foolish to pin all his hopes on that release date when the Munkaszolgálat showed so little respect for the promises it had made to its conscripts; he tried to remember the hard lessons of disappointment he’d learned in his first year of service. But the date was all he had, and he held on to it like a talisman. December fifteenth, December fifteenth: He said it under his breath as he worked, as if the repetition might hasten its arrival.

One morning when he was feeling particularly desperate, he went to the prayer service before work. A group of men met in an empty storage building every day at dawn; some of them had tiny dog-eared prayer books, and there was a miniature Torah from which they read on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbos. Inside his tallis, Andras found himself thinking not of the prayers, but, as often happened when he performed any religious observance, of his parents. When he’d written to tell them Klara was pregnant, his father had written back to say they’d make a trip to Budapest at once. Andras had been skeptical. His parents hated to travel. They hated the noise and expense and crowds, and they hated the crush of Budapest. But a few weeks later they had gone to visit Klara and had stayed for three days. Andras’s mother had promised to come back before the baby was born and to stay as long as Klara needed her.

She must have known it would be a comfort to Andras. She was expert at comforting him, at making him feel safe; she had done it unfailingly all through his childhood. During the silent Amidah, what came to him was a memory from Konyár: For his sixth birthday he’d been given a wind-up tin circus train with little tin animals rattling behind the bars of their carriages. You could open the carriages to take out the elephants and lions and bears, who could then be made to perform in a circus ring you’d drawn in the dust. The toy had come from Budapest in a red cardboard box. It so exceeded any Konyár child’s imagining of a toy that it made Andras the subject of jealous rage among his classmates-most notably the two blond boys who chased him home from school one afternoon, trying to catch him and take the train away. He ran with the red cardboard box clutched against his chest, ran toward the figure of his mother, whom he could see up ahead in the yard: She was beating rugs on wooden racks at the edge of the orchard. She turned at the sound of the boys’ approaching footsteps. By that time Andras couldn’t have been three meters away. But before he could reach her, his foot caught on an apple-tree root and he flew forward, the red box leaving his hands in a rising arc as he threw out his hands to catch himself. In one graceful motion his mother dropped her rug-beating baton and caught the box. The footsteps of Andras’s pursuers came to a halt. Andras raised his head to see his mother tuck the train box under one arm and pick up her rug-beater in the other hand. She didn’t make a move, just stood there with the tool upraised. It was a stout branch with a sort of flat round basket fixed to one end. She took a single step toward the two blond boys. Though Andras knew his mother to be a gentle person-she had never struck any of her sons-her posture seemed to suggest that she was ready to beat Andras’s attackers with just as much fervor as she had employed in beating her rugs. Andras got up in time to see the blond boys fleeing up the road, their bare feet raising clouds of dust. His mother handed him the red box and suggested that he keep the train at home for a while. Andras had entered the house with the sense that his mother was a superhuman creature, ready to fly to his aid in moments of peril. The feeling had faded soon enough; not long afterward he’d left for school in Debrecen, where his mother couldn’t protect him. But the incident had left a deep imprint upon him. He could feel his mother’s power now as if it were all happening again: The red cardboard box of his life was flying through the air, and his mother had stretched out her hands to catch it.