Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Not enough,” Andras said. “That’s the problem.”

“Well, I hope you haven’t come here looking for a job. I sent you off into the world long ago. Aren’t you an architect by now?”

Andras shook his head. “I’ve just finished a two-year spell in the Munkaszolgálat. This tall fellow is a childhood friend and company-mate of mine, Mendel Horovitz.”

Mendel gave a slight bow and touched his hat in greeting, and Frigyes Eppler looked him up and down. “Horovitz,” he said. “I’ve seen your picture somewhere.”

“Mendel holds the Hungarian record in the hundred-meter dash,” Andras said.

“That’s right! Wasn’t there some scandal about you a number of years back?”

“Scandal?” Mendel showed his wry grin. “Don’t I wish.”

“They wouldn’t allow him on the Hungarian Olympic team in ’36,” Andras said. “There was a piece about it in Past and Future. You edited it yourself.”

“Of course! What a fool I am. You’re that Horovitz. Whatever have you done with yourself since then?”

“Gotten into journalism, I’m afraid.”

“Well, of all ridiculous things! So you’re here as a supplicant too?”

“Parisi and I come as a team.”

“You mean Lévi, here? Ah, you call him Parisi because of that stint of his at the École Spéciale. I was responsible for that, you know. Not that he’d ever give me credit. He’d claim it was all due to his own talent.”

“Well, he’s not such a bad draughtsman. I hired him for the paper I was editing.”

“And what paper was that?”

From his satchel, Mendel produced a few dog-eared copies of The Biting Fly. “This is the one we made in the camp at Bánhida. It’s not as funny as the one we wrote when we were posted in Subcarpathia and Transylvania, but that one got us kicked out of our company. We were made to eat our words, in fact. Twenty pages of them apiece.”

For the first time, Frigyes Eppler’s expression grew serious; he looked carefully at Andras and Mendel, and then sat down at his managing editor’s desk to page through The Biting Fly. After reading for a while in silence, he glanced up at Mendel and gave a low chuckle. “I recognize your work,” he said. “You were the one writing that man-about-town column for the Evening Courier. A smart political instrument dressed up as a young good-for-nothing’s good-for-nothing ravings. But you were pretty sharp, weren’t you?”

Mendel smiled. “At my worst.”

“Tell me something,” Eppler said in a lowered tone. “Just what are you doing here? This paper doesn’t represent the leading edge of modern thought, you know.”

“With all respect, sir, we might ask you the same question,” Mendel said.

Eppler massaged the sallow dome of his head with one hand. “A man doesn’t always find himself where he wants to be,” he said. “I was at the Pesti Napló for a while, but they let some of us go. By which you understand what I mean.” He let out an unhappy laugh that was half wheeze; he was an inveterate smoker. “At least I stayed out of the Munkaszolgálat. I’m lucky they didn’t send me to the Eastern Front, just to make an example of me. In any case, to put it simply, I had to keep body and soul together-an old habit, you might say-so when a position opened here, I took it. Better than singing in the street for my bread.”

“Which is what we’ll be doing soon,” Mendel said. “Unless we find some work.”

“Well, I can’t say I recommend this place,” Eppler said. “As you may have gathered, I don’t always see eye to eye with the rest of the editorial staff. I’m supposed to be the chief, but, as you witnessed, my managing editor often ends up managing me.”

“Perhaps you could use someone to take your side,” Andras said.

“If I were to hire you, Lévi, it wouldn’t be to take sides. It would be to get a job done, just as when you were fresh from gimnázium.”

“I’ve learned a thing or two since then.”

“I’m sure you have. And your friend here seems an interesting fellow. I can’t say, Horovitz, that I would have hired you on the basis of your Biting Fly, but I did follow your column for a time.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be. I read every rag in this town. I consider it my job.”

“Do you think you can find something for us?” Mendel asked. “I hate to be blunt, but someone’s got to be. Lévi here has a son to look out for.”

“A son! Good God. If you’ve got a son, Lévi, then I’m an old man.” He sighed and hitched up his trousers. “What the hell, boys. Come to work here if you want to work so badly. I’ll dig something up for you.”

That night Andras found himself at the kitchen table at home, sitting with his mother and the baby while Klara lay asleep on the sofa in the front room. His mother removed a pin from the nightshirt she was sewing and sank it into her gray velveteen pincushion, the same one she’d used for as long as Andras could remember. She had brought her old sewing box with her to Budapest, and Andras had been surprised to find that his mind contained a comprehensive record of its contents: the frayed tape measure, the round blue tin that held a minestrone of buttons, the black-handled scissors with their bright blades, the mysterious prickle-edged marking wheel, the spools and spools of colored silk and cotton. Her tiny whipstitches were as tight and precise as the ones that had edged Andras’s collars when he was a boy. When she finished her row of hemming, she tied off the thread and cut it with her teeth.

“You used to like to watch me sew when you were little,” she said.

“I remember. It seemed like magic.”

She raised an eyebrow. “If it were magic, it would go faster.”

“Speed is the enemy of precision,” Andras said. “That’s what my drawing master in Paris used to tell us.”

His mother knotted the end of the thread and raised her eyes to him again. “It’s a long time since you left school, isn’t it?” she said.

“Forever.”

“You’ll go back to your studies when this is all over.”

“Yes, that’s what Apa says, too. But I don’t know what will happen. I have a wife and son now.”

“Well, it’s good news about the job,” his mother said. “You were wise to think of Eppler.”

“Yes, it’s good news,” Andras said, but it felt less like good news than he’d imagined it would. Though he was relieved to know he had a way to earn money, the idea of going back to work for Eppler seemed to erase his time in Paris entirely. He knew it made no sense; he’d met Klara in Paris, after all, and here on the table before him, asleep in a wicker basket, was Tamás Lévi, the miraculous evidence of their life together. But to arrive at work the next morning and receive the day’s assignments from Eppler-it was what he had been doing at nineteen, at twenty. It seemed to negate the possibility that he would ever complete his training, that he would ever get to do the work he craved. Everything in the world stood against his going back to school. The France in which he’d been a student had disappeared. His friends were dispersed. His teachers had fled. No school in Hungary would open its doors to him. No free country would open its borders to him. The war worsened daily. Their lives were in danger now. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before Budapest was bombed.

“Don’t give me such a dark look,” his mother said. “I’m not responsible for the situation. I’m just your mother.”

The baby began to stir in his basket. He shifted his head back and forth against the blankets, scrunched his face into a pink asterisk, and let out a cry. Andras bent over the basket and lifted the baby to his chest.

“I’ll walk him around the courtyard,” he said.