Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Tibor. Tibor.

They shouted his name in a frenzy of insistence, as if trying to convince themselves he was real, and they brought him into the house. Tibor was deathly pale in the dim light of the sitting room. His small silver-rimmed glasses were gone, the bones of his face a sharp scaffolding beneath the skin. His coat was in rags, his trousers stiff with ice and dried blood, his boots a disaster of shredded leather. His military cap was gone. In its place he wore a fleece-lined motorcyclist’s cap from which one ear-covering had been torn away. The exposed ear was crimson with cold. Tibor tugged the cap from his head and let it fall to the floor. His hair looked as though it had been hacked to the scalp with dull scissors some weeks earlier. He had the smell of the Munkaszolgálat about him, the reek of men living together without adequate water or soap or tooth powder. That smell was mingled with the sulfurous odor of brown-coal smoke and the shit-and-sawdust stink of boxcars.

“Let me see my boy,” he said, his voice scarcely louder than a whisper, as if he hadn’t used it in days.

Ilana handed him the baby in its white swaddling of blankets. Tibor laid the baby on the sofa and knelt beside him. He took off the blanket, the cap covering the baby’s fine dark hair, the long-sleeved cotton shirt, the little pants, the socks, the diaper; through it all, the baby was silent and wide-eyed, its hands curled into fists. Tibor touched the dried remnant of the baby’s umbilical cord. He held the baby’s feet, the baby’s hands. He put his face against the crease of the baby’s neck. The baby’s name was Ádám. It was what Tibor and Ilana had decided in the letters they’d exchanged. He said the name now, as if trying to bring together the idea of this baby and the actual naked child lying on the sofa. Then he glanced up at Ilana.

“Ilanka,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to be home in time.”

“No,” she said, bending to him. “Please don’t cry.”

But he was crying. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it. He cried, and they sat down on the floor with him as though they were all in mourning. But they were not in mourning, not then; they were together, the six of them, in what was still a city unghettoized, unburned, unbombed. They sat together on the floor until Tibor stopped crying, until he could draw a full breath. He drew one deep throaty breath after another, and finally took a slow inhale through his nose.

“Oh, God,” he said, with a horrified look at Andras. “I stink. Get me out of these clothes.” He began pulling at the collar of his shredded coat. “I shouldn’t have touched the baby before I washed. I’m filthy!” He got up off the floor and went to the kitchen, leaving a trail of stiff clothing behind him. They heard the clang of a tin washtub being dropped onto the kitchen tiles, and the roar of water in the sink.

“I’ll help him,” Ilana said. “Will you take the baby?”

“Give him to me,” Klara said, and handed Tamás to Andras. They sat together on the sofa, Andras and Klara and the two babies, while Ilana heated water for Tibor’s bath. In the meantime, Tibor ate dinner in his ragged undershirt and Munkaszolgálat trousers. Then Ilana undressed him and washed him from head to toe with a new cake of soap. The smell of almonds drifted in from the kitchen. When that was finished she dressed him in a pair of flannel-lined pajamas, and he moved toward the bedroom as though he were walking in a dream. Andras followed him to the bed and sat down beside him with Tamás in his arms. Klara was close behind, holding Tibor’s son. Ilana put a pair of hot towel-wrapped bricks into the bed at Tibor’s feet and pulled the eiderdown up to his chin. They all sat with him on the bed, still trying to believe he was there.

But Tibor, or part of Tibor, had not yet returned; as he drifted to the edge of sleep he made a frightened noise, as if a stone had fallen onto his chest and knocked the wind out of him. He looked at them all, eyes wide, and said, “I’m sorry.” His eyes closed again, and he drifted again, and made that frightened noise-Hunh!-and jerked awake. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and drifted, and woke. He was sorry. His eyelids closed; he breathed; he made his noise and jerked awake, haunted by something that waited on the other side of consciousness. They stayed with him through a full hour of it until he fell into a deeper sleep at last.

Tibor’s favorite coffeehouse, the Jókai, had been replaced by a barbershop with six gleaming new chairs and a brace of mustachioed barbers. That morning the barbers were practicing their art upon the heads of two boys in military uniform. The boys looked as though they could scarcely be out of high school. They had identical jutting chins and identical peaked eyebrows; their feet, on the barber-chair footrests, were identically pigeon-toed. They must have been brothers, if not twins. Andras glanced at Tibor, whose look seemed to ask what these two brothers meant, patronizing the barbers who had neatly razored away the Jókai Káveház and replaced it with this sterile black-and-white-tiled shop. There was no question of Andras and Tibor’s stopping in for a shave. The Jókai Barbershop was a traitor.

Instead they went back down Andrássy út to the Artists’ Café, a Belle Époque establishment with wrought-iron tables, amber-shaded lamps, and a glass case full of cakes. Andras insisted upon ordering a slice of Sachertorte, against Tibor’s objections-it was too expensive, too rich, he couldn’t eat more than a bite.

“You need something rich,” Andras said. “Something made with butter.”

Tibor mustered a wan smile. “You sound like our mother.”

“If I do, you should listen.”

That smile again-a pale, preserved-looking version of Tibor’s old smile, like something kept in a jar in a museum. When the torte arrived, he cut a piece with his fork and let it sit at the edge of the plate.

“You’ve heard the news from the Délvidék by now,” Tibor said.

Andras stirred his coffee and extracted the spoon. “I’ve read an article and heard some awful rumors.”

Tibor gave a barely perceptible nod. “I was there,” he said.

Andras raised his eyes to his brother’s. It was disconcerting to see Tibor without his glasses, which had refracted his unusually large eyes into balance with the rest of his features. Without them he looked raw and vulnerable. The diet of cabbage soup and brown bread and coffee had whittled him down to this elemental state; he was essence of Tibor, reduction of Tibor, the necessary ingredient that might be recombined with ordinary life to produce the Tibor that Andras knew. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what had happened to Tibor in the Délvidék. He bent to his coffee rather than meet those eyes.

“I was there a month and a half ago,” Tibor began, and told the story. It had been late January. His Munkaszolgálat company had been attached to the Fifth Army Corps; they’d been slaving for an infantry company in Szeged, building pontoon bridges on the Tisza so the company could move its materiel across. One morning their sergeant had called them away from that work and told them they were needed for a ditch-digging project. They were trucked to a town called Mošorin, marched to a field, and commanded to dig a trench. “I remember the dimensions,” Tibor said. “Twenty meters long, two and a half meters wide, two meters deep. We had to do it by nightfall.”

At the table beside them, a young woman sitting with her two little girls gave Tibor a long look and then glanced away. He touched the scroll embellishment at the end of his fork and continued in a lowered voice.

“We dug the trench,” he said. “We thought it was for a battle. But it wasn’t for a battle. After dark, they marched a group of people to the field. Men and women. A hundred and twenty-three of them. We were sitting on one side of the ditch eating our soup.”