Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

The attendant glanced away down the hall, as if it might yield some form of help or enlightenment. The hall remained empty. The attendant twisted his hands. “Visiting hours are between four and six, sir,” he said.

“This man is visiting now,” the general said. “His surname is Lévi.”

The attendant paged through a logbook on his desk. “Mrs. Lévi is on the third floor,” he said. “Maternity ward. But sir, I’m not supposed to let anyone upstairs. I’ll be fired.”

The general took a name card from a leather case. “If anyone gives you trouble, tell them to discuss the situation with me.”

“Yes, sir,” the attendant said, and sank back down into his chair.

The general turned to Andras with another name card. “If there’s anything else I can do, send word to me.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Andras said.

“Be a good father to your son,” the general said, and put a hand on Andras’s shoulder. “May he live to see a more enlightened age than our own.” He held Andras’s gaze a moment longer, then turned and made his way out into the snow. The door closed behind him with a breath of cold air.

The attendant stared after the general in amazement. “How’d you make a friend like that?” he asked Andras.

“Luck, I suppose,” Andras said. “It runs in my family.”

“Well, go on,” said the attendant, cocking a thumb toward the stairway. “If anyone asks who let you in, it wasn’t me.”

Andras raced up the staircase to the third floor, then followed signs to Klara’s ward. There, in the semidark of the hospital night, new mothers lay in a double row of beds with bassinets at their feet. Some of the bassinets held swaddled babies; other babies nursed, or drowsed in their mothers’ arms. But where was Klara? Where was her bed, and which of these children was his son? He ran the row twice before he saw her: Klara Lévi, his wife, pale and damp-haired, her mouth swollen, her eyes ringed in dark shadow, lying in a dead sleep in the glow of a green-shaded light. He crept closer, his heart hammering, to see what she held in her arms. But when he reached the bedside he saw that it was an empty blanket, nothing more. The bassinet at the foot of her bed was empty too.

The ground seemed to fall away beneath him. So he had come too late despite everything. The world held no possibility for happiness; his life and Klara’s were a ruin of grief. He covered his mouth, afraid he’d cry aloud. Someone laid a cool hand on his arm; he turned to see a nurse in a white apron.

“How did you get in?” she asked, more perplexed than angry. “Is this your wife?”

“The child,” he said, in a whisper. “Where is he?”

The nurse drew her eyebrows together. “Are you the father?”

Andras nodded mutely.

The nurse beckoned him into the hall, toward a bright-lit room filled with padded tables, infant scales, cloth diapers, feeding bottles and nipples. Two nurses stood at the tables, changing babies’ diapers.

“Krisztina,” said the nurse. “Show Mr. Lévi his son.”

The nurse at the changing table held up a tiny pink froglet, naked except for a blue cotton hat and white socks, a bandage covering its umbilicus. As Andras watched, the baby raised a fist to its open mouth and extended its petal of a tongue.

“Great God,” Andras said. “My son.”

“Two kilos,” the nurse said. “Not bad for a baby born so early. He has a bit of a lung infection, poor thing, but he’s doing better than he was at first.”

“Oh, my God. Let me look at him.”

“You can hold him if you like,” the one called Krisztina said. She pinned the baby’s diaper, wrapped him in a blanket, and set him in Andras’s arms. Andras didn’t dare breathe. The baby seemed to weigh almost nothing. Its eyes were closed, its skin translucent, its hair a dark whorl on its head. Here was his son, his son. He was this person’s father. He put his cheek to the curve of the baby’s head.

“You can take him back to your wife,” Krisztina said. “As long as you’re here in the middle of the night, you might as well be of use.”

Andras nodded, unable to move or speak. In his arms he held what seemed the sum of his existence. The baby wrestled its blankets, opened its mouth, and pronounced a strong one-note cry.

“He’s hungry,” the nurse said. “You’d better take him to her.”

And so, for the first time, he answered his son’s need: He brought him down the ward to Klara’s bed. At the sound of the baby’s next cry, Klara opened her eyes and pushed herself up onto her elbows. Andras bent over her and put their son into her arms.

“Andráska,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Am I dreaming?”

He bent to kiss her. He was shaking so hard he had to sit down on the bed. He embraced them both at once, Klara and the baby, holding them as close as he dared.

“How can it be?” she said. “How did you get here?”

He pulled back just far enough to look at her. “A general gave me a ride in his car.”

“Don’t tease me, darling! I’ve just had a cesarean.”

“I’m perfectly serious. I’ll tell you the story sometime.”

“I had a terrible fear that something had happened to you,” she said.

“There’s nothing to fear now,” he said, and stroked her damp hair.

“Look at this boy,” she said. “Our little son.” She pulled the blanket lower so he could see the baby’s face, his curled hands, his delicate wrists.

“Our son.” He shook his head, still unable to believe it. “I’ve seen him. He was au naturel when I came in.”

The baby turned his face toward Klara’s breast and opened his mouth against her nightgown. She unbuttoned the gown and settled him in to nurse, stroking his featherlike hair. “He looks just like you,” she said, and her eyes filled again.

“Életem.” My life. “Five weeks early! You must have been terrified.”

“My mother was with me. She brought me to the hospital herself. And now to have you here, too, even if just for a short time!”

“I’m finished with Bánhida,” he said. “My service is over.” He could hardly believe it himself, but it had happened. Nothing could make him go back. “I’m home with you now,” he told her. And slowly that truth came to seem real to him as he and Klara sat on her bed at Gróf Apponyi Albert Hospital, laughing and crying over the sleek downy head of their little son.

THEY NAMED THE BABY after Klara’s father. The first weeks of his life were a blue haze to Andras: There were ten days in the hospital, during which the baby lost weight, fought his lung infection, nearly died, and recovered again; there was the homecoming to their apartment on Nefelejcs utca, which seemed not really to be their home at all, stuffed as it was with flowers and gifts and guests who had come to see the baby; there was Klara’s mother, unfailingly solicitous but incapable of doing anything practical to help, as her own babies had been tended entirely by nurses; there was Andras’s mother, who knew how to tend to the baby’s needs, but who also felt it important to show Klara the correct way to pin a diaper or elicit a baby’s eructation; there was Ilana, now seven months pregnant, cooking endless Italian meals for Andras and Klara and their well-wishers; there was Mendel Horovitz, liberated from the Munkaszolgálat, sitting in the kitchen until the middle of the night, sipping vodka and inviting Andras to describe in detail the vicissitudes of new parenthood; and then there was the plain relentless work of caring for a newborn child: the feedings every two hours, the diaper changes, the brief and broken sleep, the moments of incredulous joy and bottomless fear. Every time the baby cried it seemed to Andras he might never stop, that his crying would exhaust him and make him sick again. But Klara, who had already raised a child, understood that the baby was crying because he had a simple need, and she knew she could determine the need and meet it. Soon the baby would stop crying; the house would fall into a state of delicate peace. Andras and Klara would sit together and look at the baby, their Tamás, admiring the eyebrows that were like hers, the mouth that was like his, the chin with its dimple like Elisabet’s.