Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“No,” Andras said. “I won’t have you do it.”

“I won’t have you go back to the service,” she said. She wouldn’t look at him, but her voice was low and determined. “You know what goes on there now. They’re sending men to clean up minefields on the front. They’re starving them to death.”

“I survived it for two years. I can survive it for six more months.”

“Things were different before.”

“I won’t let you sell the building.”

“What do I care for the building?” she cried. The baby looked at her, startled.

“I’ll speak to Martón,” Andras said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“And Shalhevet?” she said. “What did she write?”

“She knows some people in the Ministry of Immigration. She’ll try to make a case for our being granted visas.”

The baby kicked an arc of water into Klara’s hair, and she let out a sad laugh. “Maybe we should pray,” she said, and covered her eyes with one hand as if she were reciting the Shema. He wanted to believe that someone could be watching in pity and horror, someone who could change things if he chose. He wanted to believe that men were not in charge. But at the center of his sternum he felt a cold certainty that told him otherwise. He believed in God, yes, the God of his fathers, the one to whom he’d prayed in Konyár and Debrecen and Paris and in the work service, but that God, the One, was not One who intervened in the way they needed someone to intervene just then. He had designed the cosmos and thrown its doors open to man, and man had moved in and begun a life there. But God could no more step inside and rearrange that life than an architect could rearrange the lives of a building’s inhabitants. The world was their place now. They would use it in their fashion, live or die by their own actions. He touched Klara’s hand and she opened her eyes.

…

General Martón’s powers, though considerable, could not exempt Andras from work service. They could not even get his service postponed. But they prevented his being posted to the Eastern Front, and they won the same reprieve for Mendel Horovitz, who had been called at the same time. Andras and Mendel were assigned to Company 79/6 of the Budapest Labor Service Battalion. The company had been put to work in a rail yard so close to Budapest that the men who lived in the city could sleep at home rather than in barracks at the work site. Every morning Andras rose at four o’clock and drank his coffee in the dark kitchen, by the light of the stove; he slung his pack over his shoulder, took the tin pail of food Klara had prepared for him the night before, and slipped out into the predawn chill to meet Mendel. Now, instead of reporting to the offices of the Magyar Jewish Journal, they walked all the way to the river and crossed the Széchenyi Bridge, where the stone lions lay on their pedestals and the Romany women in black head scarves and cloaks slept with their arms around their thin-limbed children. In that blue hour a mist hovered above the surface of the Danube, rolling up from the braided currents of the water. Sometimes a barge would slide past, its low flat hull parting the vapor, and they might glimpse the bargeman’s wife standing at a glowing brazier and tending a pot of coffee. On the other side of the river they would take the tram to Óbuda, where they could get the bus that would take them to Szentendre. The bus ran along the river, and they liked to sit on the Danube side and watch the boats glide south. Often they would pass the time in silence; the subject most on their minds could not be discussed in public. Andras had received the news from Shalhevet that the Immigration Office had responded favorably to her first inquiries, and that the process was moving along more quickly than expected. There was reason to hope that they might have papers in hand by midsummer. But what then? He didn’t know whether or not he should dare to hope Klein might help them, or how much it would cost to make the journey, or how many visas Shalhevet could muster. And though spring had arrived in full force now, there was still no word from Mátyás. György’s most recent inquiries had proved fruitless. It seemed impossible to think of leaving Hungary while his brother was lost in Ukraine, perhaps dead, perhaps taken prisoner by the Soviets. But now that spring had come, Mátyás could materialize any day. It wasn’t beyond reason to hope that in three or six months they might all emigrate together. A year from now, Andras and his brothers might be going off to work in an orange grove in Palestine, perhaps at one of the kibbutzim Rosen had described, Degania or Ein Harod. Or they might be fighting for the British-Mendel had heard that there was a battalion of soldiers that had been formed from members of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine.

When the bus reached Szentendre, they climbed down with the other men-their workmates who had boarded at Óbuda or Rómaifürdő or Csillaghegy-and walked the half mile to the train-loading yard. The first trucks pulled in at seven o’clock. The drivers would roll up the tarps to reveal corded cubes of blankets, crates of potatoes, bolts of military canvas, cases of ammunition, or whatever else it was that they happened to be shipping to the front that day. Andras and Mendel and their workmates had to move the goods from the trucks to the boxcars that waited on the tracks, doors yawning wide in the growing light. When they had finished loading one car, they would move on to another and another. But the operation wasn’t as simple as it looked. The cars, once filled, were not sealed; they were left open to roll into a shed where they would be inspected. At least that was what Andras and Mendel had been told when the foreman had set them to work: After the cars were loaded, they would be inspected by a corps of specially trained soldiers. If anything was missing, the work servicemen would be held responsible and punished. Only when every item had been tallied would the trains be sealed and sent to the front.

The inspectors came and went in covered trucks. Soldiers drove the trucks directly into the inspection shed and parked them beside the train. Through the broad rectangular doors, Andras could see the soldiers moving quickly between the train and the trucks. The inspectors didn’t bother to conceal what was going on; they oversaw the operation with the confidence of their privileged place in the chain of command. Overcoats, blankets, potatoes, cans of beans, guns: Every day, a tithe of it drifted from the boxcars to the trucks. When the soldiers had finished with one boxcar, the inspectors would seal it and the train would roll forward so the soldiers could get to work on the next. They had to work fast for the trains to run on time; the railway schedule made no allowance for black-market siphoning. Once the soldiers had done their work, the inspectors would declare the trainload complete and sign the paperwork. Then they would send the train off to the front. The covered trucks would roll out, the siphoned goods would slide into the black market, and the inspectors would share the proceeds among themselves. It was a tidy and profitable business. In their shed, the inspectors smoked expensive cigars and compared gold pocket watches and played cards for piles of pengő. The guards must have been getting their share of the profits, too-at lunchtime, instead of standing in line at the mess tent, they drank beer and grilled strings of Debrecen sausages, smoked Mirjam cigarettes, and paid the work servicemen to polish their new-looking boots.

Andras knew what the skimming would mean to the soldiers and laborers on the front. There would be too few blankets to go around, too few potatoes in the soup. Someone might not get new boots when his old boots fell apart. The work servicemen would be the hardest hit: They’d be forced to write promissory notes for hundreds of pengő to buy the most basic supplies. Later, when the guards and officers went home on furlough, they would present the notes to the servicemen’s families, threatening that the men would be killed if their wives or mothers didn’t produce the money. But the labor servicemen at Szentendre Yard seemed to regard the practice as a matter of course. What could any of them have done to stop it? Day after day they loaded the trains and the soldiers unloaded them.