Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

When he wasn’t consumed with thoughts of Klara, he was thinking about his brothers. The mail distribution center had become a source of constant dread. Every time he passed it he imagined receiving a telegram that brought terrible news about Mátyás’s fate. There had been no word since his deployment to the east, and György’s efforts to help him had met with frustration. György had sent a series of letters to high Munkaszolgálat officials, but had been told that no one could bother with a problem of this scale when there was a war to be fought. If he wanted to arrange Mátyás’s exemption from service he would have to contact the boy’s battalion commander in Belgorod. Further inquiry revealed that Mátyás’s battalion had finished its service in Belgorod and had been sent farther east; now the battalion command headquarters was situated somewhere near Rostov-on-Don. György sent a barrage of telegrams to the commander but heard nothing for weeks. Then he received a brief handwritten note from a battalion secretary, who informed him that Mátyás’s company had slipped into the whiteout of the Russian winter. They had registered their location via wireless a few weeks earlier, but their communication lines had since been broken and their whereabouts could not be determined now with any certainty.

So this was what he had to picture: his brother Mátyás somewhere far away in the snow, the tether to his battalion command center severed, his company drifting with its army group toward deeper cold and danger. What was he eating? What was he wearing? Where was he sleeping? How could Andras lie in a bunk at night and eat bread every morning when his brother was lost in Ukraine? Did Mátyás imagine that Andras hadn’t tried to help him, or that György Hász had refused? Who was responsible for Mátyás’s current peril? Was it Edith Novak, who had spilled Klara’s secret? Was it Klara’s long-ago attackers? Was it Andras himself, whose connection to Klara had made the price of his brother’s freedom so high? Was it Miklós Horthy, whose desire to restore Hungary ’s territories had drawn him into the war, or Hitler, whose madness had driven him into Russia? How many other men besides Mátyás found themselves in extremis that winter, and how many more would die before the war was over?

It was some comfort to know that Tibor, at least, remained far from the front lines. His letters continued to drift in from Transylvania according to the whims of the military postal service. Three weeks would go by without a word, then a clutch of five letters would come, then a single postcard the next day, and then nothing for two weeks. During his time in the Carpathians, the tone of Tibor’s writing had devolved from its casual banter to a stricken monotone: Dear Andras, another day of bridge-building. I miss Ilana terribly. Worry about her every minute. Plenty of disaster here: Today my workmate Roszenzweig broke his arm. A complex open fracture. I have no splints or casting materials or antibiotics, of course. Had to set the fracture with strip of planking from the barracks floor. Or, Eight servicemen down with pneumonia last week. Three died. How it grieves me to think of it! I know I could have kept them hydrated if I hadn’t been sent out with the road crew. And another letter, in its entirety: Dear Andráska, I can’t sleep. Ilana is in her 21st week now. Last time the miscarriage occurred in the 22nd. Andras wished he could write to Tibor about what he’d learned in Budapest, but he didn’t want to compound Tibor’s fears with his own. He wasn’t alone in his anxiety, though; every week a pair of ivory-colored envelopes arrived from Benczúr utca with words of reassurance. One would be from György-No news, no new threats. All goes on as before-and the other would carry Klara’s mother’s seal-Dear Andras, know that we are all thinking of you and wishing you a speedy return. How Klara misses you, dear boy! And how happy it will make her when you come home. The doctor believes her to be getting on quite well. Once she sent Andras a small package, the contents of which had evidently been so attractive that nothing remained in the box except her note: Andráska, here are a few sweets for you. If you like them, I’ll send more. Andras had brought the box back to the barracks to show it to Mendel, who had roared with laughter and suggested they display it on a shelf as an icon of life at Bánhida. It was a comfort, too, to have Mendel there; they would finish their terms of service together and would travel back to Budapest on the same train. At least that was what they planned, marking off the boxes on their hand-drawn calendar as the days grew colder and the distant hills faded to winter brown.

But on the twenty-fifth of November, a day whose gray blankness yielded in the evening to a confetti storm of snow, there was a telegram from György waiting for Andras at the central office. He tore it open with shaking hands and read that Klara had given birth the previous night, five weeks before her due date. They had a son, but he was very ill. Andras must come home at once.

It was a long time before he could move or speak. Other work servicemen tried to shuffle him aside to get to the counter; was he going to stand there all day? He made his way to the door of the office and staggered out into the snow. The lights of the camp had been lit early that evening. They formed a brilliant halo around the quadrangle, broken only by a brace of brighter, taller lights on either side of the administrative offices. Andras moved toward that bracket of lights as if toward a portal through which he might be conducted to Budapest. He had a son, but he was very ill. A son. A boy. His boy, and Klara’s. Fifty miles away. Two hours by train.

The guards who usually flanked the door had gone to supper. Andras went in unhindered. He passed by offices with electric heaters, telephones, mimeograph machines. He didn’t know where Major Barna’s office was, but he felt his way into the heart of the building, following the architectural lines of force. There, where he would have placed the major’s office if he had designed this building, was the major’s office. But its door was locked. Barna, too, had gone to supper. Andras went back outside into the blowing snow.

Everyone knew where the officers’ mess hall was. It was the only place at Bánhida from which the smell of real food issued. No thin broth, no hard bread there; instead they ate chicken and potatoes and mushroom soup, veal paprikás, stuffed cabbage, all of it with white bread. Servicemen who had been assigned to deliver coal or remove garbage from the officers’ mess hall had to suffer the aromas of those dishes. No serviceman, except those who waited on the officers, could enter the mess hall; it was guarded by soldiers with guns. But Andras approached the building without fear. He had a son. The first flush of his joy had mingled with the physical need to protect this child, to interpose his own body between him and whatever might do him harm. And Klara: If their child was dangerously ill, she needed him too. Guards with guns were of no consequence. The only thing that mattered was that he get out of Bánhida.

The guards at the door were not ones he recognized; they must have been fresh from Budapest. That was to Andras’s advantage. He approached the door and addressed himself to the shorter and stockier guard, a fellow who looked as though the smells of meat and roasted peppers were a torment to him.

“Telegram for Major Barna,” Andras said, raising the blue envelope in one hand.

The guard squinted at him in the glow of the electric lights. Snow swirled between them. “Where’s the adjutant?” he asked.

“He’s at dinner, too, sir,” Andras said. “Kovács at the communications center ordered me to bring it myself.”