Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Never,” he said. “I’d sooner die than leave without the two of you.”

“What a dramatic thing to say, darling.”

“I don’t care if it’s dramatic. That’s how I feel.”

“Here, take your little son. My leg’s asleep.” She lifted the child and handed him to Andras, then fastened the buttons of her blouse. With a grimace of pain she got to her feet and walked the length of the room. “Write to Shalhevet,” she said. “Just to see. At least then we’ll know if there’s another course of action to consider. Otherwise we’re only speculating.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“I hope not,” she said. “But it seems the wrong time for broad resolutions.”

“Won’t you let me preserve the illusion that I have a choice?”

“It’s a dangerous time for illusions, too,” she said, and came back to sit beside him on the sofa, laying her head on his shoulder. As they sat together and watched their son sleep, Andras felt a renewed pang of guilt: He was, in fact, allowing her to live inside an illusion-that she was safe, that the past was securely lodged in the past, that her fears of endangering her family by her return to Hungary had been unfounded.

The illusion continued all that spring. A reorganization in the Ministry of Justice slowed the mechanisms of extortion, and the need to give up the house on Benczúr utca was temporarily relieved. Andras continued to work as a layout artist and illustrator, with Mendel penning articles nearby in the newsroom. If it seemed surreal at first to have as their legitimate employment what had until a few months earlier been a covert and guilty extracurricular, the feeling was soon replaced by the ordinary rhythms and pressures of work. Tibor, once he had recovered his health and strength, found employment too. He became a surgical assistant at a Jewish hospital in the Erzsébetváros. In March there was news from Elisabet: Paul had joined the navy and would ship out to the South Pacific in late April. His parents, in a fit of remorse occasioned by their son’s enlistment and by the birth of their first grandchild the previous summer, had by now relented entirely and had insisted that Elisabet and little Alvie come to live with them in Connecticut. Elisabet had enclosed a photograph of the family in sledding gear, herself in a dark hooded coat, the muffled-up Alvie in her arms, Paul standing beside them holding the ropes of a long toboggan. Another photograph showed Alvie by himself, propped in a chair with pillows all around him, wearing a velvet jacket and short pants. The high round forehead and wry mouth were all Paul, but the ice-hard penetration of his baby gaze could only have been Elisabet’s. She promised that Paul’s father would speak to his contacts in the government to see if anything could be done to secure entry visas for Andras, Klara, and the baby.

Andras wrote to Shalhevet, and a reply came four weeks later. She promised to speak to the people she knew in the Immigration Office. Though she couldn’t foresee how long the process might take or whether she would succeed, she thought she could make a strong case for Andras and Tibor’s being granted visas. As Andras must know, the department’s main concern at the moment was to extract Jews from German-occupied territories. But future doctors and architects would be of great value to the Jewish community of Palestine. She might even be able to do something for Andras’s friend, the political journalist and record-breaking athlete; he, too, was the kind of exceptional young man the Immigration Office liked to help. And if Andras and Tibor came, of course their families must come with them. What a shame that they hadn’t all emigrated together before the war! Rosen missed his Paris friends desperately. Had Andras heard from Polaner or Ben Yakov? Rosen had made dozens of inquiries, to no avail.

Andras sat on the edge of the courtyard fountain and reread the letter. He hadn’t heard from Polaner or Ben Yakov, not since the missives he’d received during his first Munkaszolgálat posting. If Ben Yakov was still with his parents in Rouen, he would be living in occupied France under the Nazi flag. And Polaner, who had been so eager to fight for his adopted country-where would he have been sent after his discharge from the French military? Where would he be now? What hardships, what humiliations, would he have had to face since the last time Andras had seen him? How would Andras ever learn what had become of him? He trailed his hand through the cold water of the fountain, released now from its winter ice. Beneath the surface, the shapes of the fish moved like slender ghosts. There had been coins at the bottom of the fountain last fall, five- and ten-fillér coins glinting against the blue tiles. Someone must have removed them when the ice thawed. Now, no one would throw coins into a fountain. No one could spare ten fillér for a wish.

In the darkness of the barracks in Subcarpathia and Transylvania and Bánhida, Andras had forced himself to consider the possibility that Polaner might be dead, that he might have been beaten or starved or infected or shot; but he had never allowed himself to think that he would not someday know what had happened-not know for certain whether to search or hope or mourn. He could not mourn by default. It ran against his nature. But it had been twenty-three months since there had been any word of Polaner-soft-voiced Eli Polaner, hidden somewhere within the dark explosive tangle of Europe. He dared not follow the thought around to its other side, where the image of his brother Mátyás waited, a white shape glimpsed through the veil of a blizzard. Mátyás, still lost. No word from his Munkaszolgálat company since last November. Now it was April. In Ukraine the steady cold would have just begun to relent. Soon it would become possible to bury the winter’s dead.

He had left Klara with the baby, the rest of the mail in a jumble on his desk. He would go and see if he could help her; it would only make him feel worse to sit at the edge of the fountain and consider all the things he could not know. He climbed the stairs and opened the apartment door, listening for the baby’s lifted voice. But a film of silence had settled over the rooms. The kettle had ceased to bubble on the stove. The baby’s bathwater stood cold in its little tin tub, still awaiting the addition of the hot. The baby’s towel lay folded on the kitchen table, his jacket and pants beside it.

Andras heard the baby make a noise, a brief two-note plaint; the sound came from the sitting room. He entered to find Klara on the sofa with the baby in her arms. An opened letter lay on the low table before her. She raised her eyes to Andras.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s happened?”

“You’ve been called again,” she said. “You’ve been called back to work duty.”

He scrutinized the letter, an abbreviated rectangle of thin white paper stamped with the insignia of the KMOF. He was to report to the Budapest Munkaszolgálat Office two mornings hence; he would be assigned to a new battalion and company, and given orders for six months of labor service.

“This can’t be,” he said. “I can’t leave you again, not with the baby.”

“But what can we do?”

“I still have General Martón’s card. I’ll go to his office. Maybe he can help us.”

The baby twisted in Klara’s arms and made another sound of protest. “Look at him,” she said. “Naked as a newborn. I forgot all about his bath. He must be freezing.” She got up and brought him into the kitchen, holding him against her. She emptied the kettle into his little tub and stirred the water with her hand.

“I’ll go tomorrow morning,” Andras said. “I’ll see what can be done.”

“Yes,” she said, and lowered the baby into the tub. She laid him back against her arm and rubbed soap into the fine brown fluff of his hair. “And if he can’t help, I’ll write to my solicitor in Paris. Maybe it’s time to sell the building.”