Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

The young woman had turned slightly in her chair. She was perhaps thirty years old; they saw now that she wore a silver Star of David on a narrow chain at her neck. She raised her eyes toward her children, who were sharing a cup of chocolate and finishing the last crumbs of a slice of poppyseed strudel.

When Tibor spoke again, his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper. “There were children there, too,” he said. “Teenagers. Some of them couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen.”

“Zsuzsi, Anni,” the woman said. “Why don’t you go choose some little cakes to take to your grandmother?”

“I’m not done with my chocolate,” the smaller girl said.

“Tibor,” Andras said, laying a hand on his brother’s arm. “Tell me later.”

“No,” the woman said quietly, meeting Andras’s eye. “It’s all right.” To the girls she said, “Go ahead, I’ll come in a moment.” The older girl put on her coat and helped the younger one get her sleeves turned right side out. Then they went to the pastry counter and stared at the display of cakes, their fingers pressed against the glass. The woman folded her hands in her lap and looked down at her empty teacup.

“They lined up these people in front of the ditch,” Tibor said. “Hungarians. Jews, all of them. They made them strip naked and stand there in the freezing cold for half an hour. And they shot them,” he said. “Even the children. Then we had to bury them. Some of them weren’t dead yet. The soldiers turned their guns on us while we did it.”

Andras glanced at the woman beside them, who had covered her mouth with her hand. At the pastry counter beyond, her two little girls argued the merits of the cakes.

“What’s to stop them from doing it to us?” Tibor said. “We’re not safe here. Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” Andras said. Of course they weren’t safe. There wasn’t a minute that passed without his thinking about it. And the danger was deeper than Tibor knew: Andras still hadn’t told him about the situation with Klara and the Ministry of Justice.

“The threat is here inside the country,” Tibor said. “We’re lying to ourselves if we think we’ll be fine as long as Horthy holds off a German occupation. What about the Arrow Cross? What about plain old Hungarian bigotry?”

“What do you propose we do?” Andras said.

“Let me tell you something,” Tibor said. “I want to get off this continent. I want to get my wife and son out. If we stay in Europe we’re going to die.”

“How are we supposed to get out? The border’s closed. It’s impossible to get travel documents. No one will let us in. And there are the babies. It’s bad enough to imagine doing it by ourselves.” He looked over his shoulder; even to speak of these things in public seemed dangerous. “We can’t leave now,” he said. “It’s impossible.”

The woman at the next table sent a glance in Andras and Tibor’s direction, her dark eyes moving between the two of them. At the counter, her little girls had made their selections; the older one turned and called for her to come. She stood and put on her hat and coat. As she slipped through the narrow space between the tables, she gave Andras and Tibor a curt nod. It wasn’t until after she and her girls had disappeared through the beveled glass doors of the café that Andras noticed she’d dropped her handkerchief on the table. It was a fine linen handkerchief with a lace edge, embroidered with the letter B. Andras lifted it to reveal a folded scrap of paper, the stub of a streetcar ticket, onto which something had been scratched in pencil: K might be able to help you. And an address in Angyalföld, near the end of the streetcar line.

“Look at this,” Andras said, and handed the ticket stub to his brother.

Glassesless, Tibor squinted at the woman’s tiny writing. “K might be able to help you,” he said. “Who’s K?”

They rode out past the apartment blocks of central Pest, out into an industrial suburb where textile factories and machine works exhaled gray smoke into a mackerel sky. Military supply trucks rumbled down the streets, their beds stacked with steel tubes and I-beams, concrete flume sections and cinderblocks and giant parabolas of iron like leviathan ribs. They got off the streetcar at the end of the line and walked out past an ancient madhouse and a wool-washing plant, past three blocks of crumbling tenements, to a small side street called Frangepán köz, where a cluster of cottages seemed to have survived from the days when Angyalföld had been pastureland and vineyard; from behind the houses came the chatter and musk of goats. Number 18 was a plaster-and-timber cottage with a steep wood-shingled roof and flaking shutters. The window frames were peeling, the door scuffed and toothy along its edge. Winter remnants of ivy traced an unreadable map across the façade. As Andras and Tibor crossed the garden, a high gate at the side of the house opened to let forth a little green cart pulled by two strong white wethers with curving horns. The cart was packed with milk cans and crates of cheese. At the gate stood a tiny woman with a hazel switch in her hand. She wore an embroidered skirt and peasant boots, and her deep-set eyes were hard and bright as polished stones. She gave Andras a look so penetrating it seemed to touch the back of his skull.

“Does someone with the initial K live here?” he asked her.

“The initial K?” She must have been eighty, but she stood straight-backed against the wind. “Why do you want to know?”

Andras glanced at the ticket scrap on which the woman at the café had written the address. “This is 18 Frangepán köz, isn’t it?”

“What do you want with K?”

“A friend sent us here.”

“What friend?”

“A woman with two little girls.”

“You’re Jewish,” the old woman said; it was an observation, not a question. And something changed in her features as she said it, a certain softening of the lines around her eyes, an almost imperceptible relaxation of the shoulders.

“That’s right,” Andras said. “We’re Jewish.”

“And brothers. He’s the elder.” She pointed her hazel stick at Tibor.

They both nodded.

The woman lowered her stick and scrutinized Tibor as if she were trying to see beneath his skin. “You’re just back from the Munkaszolgálat,” she said.

“Yes.”

She reached into a basket for a paper-wrapped round of cheese and pressed it into his hand. When he protested, she gave him another.

“K is my grandson,” she said. “Miklós Klein. He’s a good boy, but he’s not a magician. I can’t promise he can help you. Talk to him if you like, though. Go to the door. My husband will let you in.” She closed and locked the gates of the yard behind her; then she touched the wethers on their backs with the hazel wand, and they tossed their white heads and pulled the cart into the street.

As soon as she had gone, a clutch of goats came up to the gate and bleated at Andras and Tibor. The goats seemed to expect some kind of gift. Andras showed them his empty pockets, but they wouldn’t back away. They wanted to butt their heads against Andras’s and Tibor’s hands. The kids wanted a sniff at their shoes. At the far end of the yard a stable had been converted into a goat house, sheltered from the wind and piled with new hay. Four does stood feeding at a tin trough, their coats glossy and thick.

“Not a bad place to be a goat,” Andras said. “Even in the middle of winter.”

“A better place to be a goat than a man,” Tibor said, glancing toward the factory chimneys in the near distance.

But Andras thought he wouldn’t mind living farther from the city center someday. Not, preferably, in the shadow of a textile factory, but maybe in a place where they could have a house, a yard big enough for goats and chickens and a few fruit trees. He wanted to come back with his notebook and drawing tools and study the construction of this cottage, the layout of these grounds. It was the first time in months he’d had the desire to do an architectural drawing. As he followed his brother up the walk he experienced a strange sensation in his chest, a feeling of rising, as if his lungs were filled with yeast.