Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“You’re crazy!” Klein said. “Plain crazy. I can’t smuggle babies down the Danube while the country’s at war. I can’t be responsible for elderly parents. I refuse to discuss this. I’m sorry. You both seem like good men. Maybe we’ll meet in happier times and have a drink together.” He went to the door and opened it onto the hallway.

Tibor didn’t move. He scanned the stacks of papers, the typewriters, the radio, the dossier-smothered furniture, as if they might offer a different answer. But it was Andras who spoke.

“Shalhevet Rosen,” he said. “Have you heard that name?”

“No.”

“She’s in Palestine, working to get Jews out of Europe. She’s the wife of a friend of mine from school.”

“Well, maybe she can help you. I wish you luck.”

“Maybe you’ve had some correspondence with her.”

“Not that I recall.”

“Maybe she can help get us visas.”

“A visa means nothing,” Klein said. “You’ve still got to get there.”

Tibor glanced around the room again. He gave Klein a penetrating look. “This is what you do,” he said. “Do you mean to say you’re finished now?”

“I won’t send people to another Struma,” Klein said. “You can understand that. And I have to look out for my grandparents. If I get caught and thrown in jail, they’ll be all alone.”

Tibor paused at the door, his hat in his hands. “You’ll change your mind,” he said.

“I hope not.”

“Let us leave our address, at least.”

“I’m telling you, it’s no use. Goodbye, gentlemen. Farewell. Adieu.” He ushered them into the dim hallway and retreated into his room, latching the door behind him.

In the main room Andras and Tibor found the breakfast things cleared away and the elder Klein installed on the sofa, newspaper in hand. When he became aware of them standing before him, he lowered the paper and said, “Well?”

“Well,” Tibor said. “We’ll be going now. Please tell your wife we appreciate her kindness.” He raised one of the paper-wrapped rounds of goat cheese.

“One of her best,” Klein-the-elder said. “She must have taken a shine to you. She doesn’t give those away lightly.”

“She gave me two,” Tibor said, and smiled.

“Ah! Now you’re making me jealous.”

“Maybe she can prevail upon your grandson to help us. I’m afraid he turned us away without much hope.”

“Miklós is a moody boy,” the elder Klein said. “His work is difficult. He changes his mind about it daily. Does he know how to reach you?”

Tibor took a small blunt pencil from his breast pocket and asked Klein’s grandfather for a piece of paper, apologizing for the fact that he didn’t have a name card. He wrote his address on the scrap and left it on the breakfast table.

“There it is,” Tibor said. “In case he changes his mind.”

Klein’s grandfather made a noise of assent. From the yard, the raised voices of goats made a pessimistic counterpoint. The wind clattered the shutters against the house, a sound directly from Andras’s deepest childhood. He had the feeling of having stepped out of the flow of time-as if he and Tibor, when they passed through the doorway of this house, would reenter a different Budapest altogether, one in which the cars had been replaced by carriages, the electric streetlights by gaslights, the women’s knee-length skirts by ankle-length ones, the metro system erased, the news of war expunged from the pages of the Pesti Napló. The twentieth century cut clean away from the tissue of time like an act of divine surgery.

But when they opened the outer door it was all still there: the trucks rumbling along the broad cross-street at the end of the block, the towering smokestacks of the textile plant, the film advertisements plastered along a plywood construction wall. He and his brother walked in silence back toward the streetcar line and caught a near-empty train back toward the city center. It took them down Kárpát utca, with its machine-repair shops, then over the bridge behind Nyugati Station, and finally to Andrássy út, where they got off and headed toward home. But when they reached the corner of Hársfa utca, Tibor turned. Hands in his pockets, he walked the block to the gray stone building where they’d lived before Andras had gone to Paris. On the third floor were their windows, now uncurtained and dark. A row of broken flowerpots stood on the balcony; an empty bird feeder hung from the rail. Tibor looked up at the balcony, the wind lifting his collar.

“Can you blame me?” he said. “Do you understand why I want to get out?”

“I understand,” Andras said.

“Think about what I told you at the café. That happened here in Hungary. Now think what must be happening in Germany and Poland. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve heard. People are being starved and crowded to death in ghettoes. People are being shot by the thousands. Horthy can’t hold it off forever. And the Allies don’t care about the Jews, not enough to make a difference on the ground. We have to take care of ourselves.”

“But what’s the use, if we die doing it?”

“If we have visas, we’ll have some measure of protection. Write to Shalhevet. See if there’s anything her organization can do.”

“It’ll take a long time. Months, maybe, just to exchange a few letters.”

“Then you’d better start now,” Tibor said.

THAT AFTERNOON he told Klara about the cottage in Frangepán köz, and about Klein in his bedroom surrounded by the manila files of a thousand would-be emigrants. They were in the sitting room, the baby at Klara’s breast, its hand clenching and unclenching in her hair.

“What do you think?” she said quietly. “Do you think we should try to get out?”

“It seems insane, doesn’t it? But I haven’t seen the things Tibor’s seen.”

“What about your parents? And my mother?”

“I know,” he said. “It’s a desperate thing to think about. Maybe it’s not the right time. If we wait, things might get better. But maybe I should write to Shalhevet anyway. Just in case there’s something she can do.”

“You can write,” she said. “But if there were something she could do, wouldn’t she have told us about it already?” The baby moved his head and released his grip on Klara’s hair. She shifted him to the other side, draping herself with his blanket.

“I wrote to Rosen from the labor service,” Andras said. “He knew I couldn’t have left then, even if I’d wanted to.”

“And now we have the baby,” Klara said.

Andras tried to envision her feeding their son in the cargo hold of a Danube riverboat, under the cover of a tarpaulin. Did people make escape attempts with infants, he wondered? Did they drug their children with laudanum and pray they wouldn’t cry? The baby pulled the blanket away from Klara’s breast and she arranged it again.

“There’s no need to do that,” Andras said. “Let me see you.”

Klara smiled. “I suppose I got into the habit of covering up at my mother’s house. Elza can’t abide the sight of it. She considers it unsanitary. She’d be scandalized to know I do it in your presence.”

“It’s perfectly natural. And look at him. Doesn’t he look happy?”

The baby’s toes curled and uncurled. He waved a dark hank of Klara’s hair in his fist. His eyes moved to her eyes, and he blinked, and blinked again more slowly, and his eyelids drifted closed. Intoxicated with milk, he released Klara’s hair and let his legs fall limp against her arm. His hands opened into starfish. His mouth fell away from her breast.

Klara raised her eyes to Andras and held his gaze. “What if you were to go?” she said. “You and Tibor? Get there safely and send for us when you can? At least it would keep you out of the Munkaszolgálat.”