Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

When Tibor knocked on the door, a dust of yellow paint drifted down like pollen. There were shuffling footsteps from inside; the door opened to reveal a tiny dried man with two uplifted wings of gray hair. He wore a white undershirt and a dressing gown of faded crimson wool. From behind him came a strain of scratchy Bartók and the smell of pancakes.

“Mr. Klein?” Tibor said.

“The same.”

“Does Miklós Klein live here?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Tibor and Andras Lévi. We were told to come see him. Your wife said he was at home.”

The man opened the door and beckoned them into a small bright room with a red-painted concrete floor. On a table near the window, the remains of breakfast lay beside a crisply folded newspaper. “Wait here,” the elder Klein said. He went to the end of a brief hallway decorated with portraits of men and women in antique-looking costumes, the men in military uniform, the women in the cinch-waisted gowns of the previous century. A door opened and closed at the end of the hall. On the wall, a cuckoo clock struck the hour and the cuckoo sang eleven times. A collection of photographs on a side table showed a bright-eyed boy of six or seven holding the hands of a beautiful dark-haired young woman and a melancholy, intelligent-looking man; there were photographs of the three of them at the beach, on bicycles, in a park, on the steps of a synagogue. The collection conveyed the sense of a shrine or a memorial.

After a few minutes the door opened at the end of the hall, and the elder Klein shuffled toward them and beckoned with one hand. “Please,” he said. “This way.”

Andras followed his brother down the hall, past the portraits of the military men and tight-laced women. At the door, the old man stepped aside to let them in, then retreated to the sitting room.

The doorway was a portal to another world still. On one side was the universe they had just left, where breakfast things lay on a wooden table in a shaft of sun, and the bleating of goats floated in from the yard, and a dozen photographs suggested what had vanished; on the other side, in this room, were what looked like the accoutrements of a spy operation. The walls were plastered with pin-studded maps of Europe and the Mediterranean, with intricate flowcharts and newspaper clippings and photographs of men and women working the dry soil in desert settlements. On the desk, wedged between towering stacks of official-looking documents, stood a brace of typewriters, one with a Hungarian keyboard and the other with a Hebrew one. An Orion radio whined and crackled on a low table, and a quartet of clocks beside it showed the time in Constanţa, Istanbul, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Papers and dossiers rose in waist-high columns all around the room, crowding the desk, the bed, every centimeter of windowsill and table. At the center of it all stood a pale young person in a moth-eaten sweater, his short black hair like a ragged crown, his eyes raw and red as if from drink or grief. He looked to be about Andras’s age, and was unmistakably the little boy from the photographs, grown into this haggard young man. He pulled out the desk chair, moved a stack of dossiers onto the floor, and sat down to face the brothers.

“It’s all over,” he said by way of greeting. “I’m not doing it anymore.”

“We were told you could help us,” Tibor said.

“Who told you that?”

“A woman with two little girls. Initial B. She heard me talking to my brother at a café.”

“Talking to your brother about what?”

“About getting out of Hungary,” Tibor said. “One way or another.”

“First of all,” Klein said, pointing a narrow finger at Tibor, “you shouldn’t have been talking to your brother about a thing like that at a café, where anyone could hear you. Secondly, I should strangle that woman, whoever she is, for giving you my address! Initial B? Two little girls?” He put his fingers to his forehead and seemed to think. “Bruner,” he said. “Magdolna. It’s got to be. I got her brother out. But that was two years ago.”

“Is that what you do?” Andras said. “Arrange emigrations?”

“Used to,” Klein said. “Not anymore.”

“Then what’s all this stuff?”

“Ongoing projects,” Klein said. “But I’m not accepting new work.”

“We’ve got to leave the country,” Tibor said. “I’ve just been in the Délvidék. They’re killing Hungarian Jews there. It won’t be long before they come for us. We understand you can help us get out.”

“You don’t understand,” Klein said. “It’s impossible now. Look at this.” He produced a clipping from a Romanian newspaper. “This happened just a few weeks ago. This ship left Constanţa in December. The Struma. Seven hundred and sixty-nine passengers, all Romanian Jews. They were told they’d get Palestinian entry visas once the ship reached Turkey. But the ship was a wreck. Literally. Its engine was salvaged from the bottom of the Danube. And there were no entry visas. It was all a scam. Maybe at one time they’d’ve gotten in without visas-the British used to allow some paperless immigrations. Not anymore! Britain wouldn’t take the boat. They wouldn’t take anyone, not even the children. A Turkish coast guard ship towed it into the Black Sea. No fuel, no water, no food for the passengers. Left it there. What do you think happened? It was torpedoed. Boom. End of story. They think it was the Soviets who did it.”

Andras and Tibor sat silent, taking it in. Seven hundred and sixty-nine lives-a ship full of Jewish men, women, and children. An explosion in the night-how it must have sounded, how it must have felt from a berth deep inside the ship: the shock and quake of it, the sudden panic. And then the inrush of dark water.

“But what about Magdolna Bruner’s brother?” Tibor asked. “How did you get him out?”

“Things were different then,” Klein said. “I got people out along the Danube. Smuggled them out on cargo barges and riverboats. We had contacts in Palestine. We had help from the Palestine Office here. I got a lot of people out, a hundred and sixty-eight of them. If I were smart, I’d have gone, too. But my grandparents were all alone. They couldn’t make a trip like that, and I couldn’t leave them. I thought I might be of more use here. But I won’t do it anymore, so you might as well go home.”

“But this a disaster for Palestine, this Struma,” Andras said. “They’ll have to loosen the immigration restrictions now.”

“I don’t know what’ll happen,” Klein said. “They have a new colonial secretary now, a man called Cranborne. He’s supposed to be more liberal-minded. But I don’t know if he can convince the Foreign Office to relax its quotas. Even if he could, it’s far too dangerous now.”

“If it’s a matter of money, we’ll come up with it,” Tibor said.

Andras gave his brother a sharp glance. Where did Tibor expect them to get the money? But Tibor wouldn’t look at him. He kept his eyes fixed on Klein, who ran his hands through his electrified hair and leaned forward toward them.

“It’s not the money,” Klein said. “It’s just that it’s a mad thing to try.”

“It might be madder to stay,” Tibor said.

“Budapest is still one of the safest places for Jews in Europe,” Klein said.

“Budapest lives in the shadow of Berlin.”

Klein pushed back his chair and got up to pace his square of floor. “The horrible thing is that I know you’re right. We’re mad to feel any sense of security here. If you’ve been in the labor service, you know that well enough. But I can’t take the lives of two young men into my hands. Not now.”

“It’s not just us,” Tibor said. “It’s our wives, too. And a couple of babies. And our younger brother, once he returns from Ukraine. And our parents in Debrecen. We all need to get out.”