Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“How will you not publish underground? Do you plan to offer Varsádi a subscription?”

“As soon as we’ve got the first issue printed.”

She shook her head. “You can’t do this,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I know the risks,” he said. “Perhaps even better than you do. This paper’s not just fun and games, Klara. We want to make the men think about what’s going on at Szentendre. We’re shorting our brothers on the front every day. In my case, perhaps literally.”

“And what makes you think Varsádi won’t object?”

“He’s a sybarite and a fond old fool. The paper will praise his leadership. He won’t see anything past that. He’s got no loyalty to anything but his own pleasures. I’d be surprised if he had any politics at all.”

“And what if you’re mistaken?”

“Then we’ll stop publishing.” He stood and put his arms around her, but she kept her back erect, her eyes on his own.

“I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to you,” she said.

“I’m a husband and a father,” he said, following the ridge of her spine with his palm. “I’ll stop immediately if I think there’s any real danger.”

At that moment Tamás began to cry again, and Klara drew herself away and went to soothe him. Andras stayed up all night to finish the work. Klara would come to understand his reasons, Andras felt, even those he hadn’t voiced aloud-those that were more personal, and concerned the difference between feeling at the mercy of one’s fate and, to some small degree, the master of it.

That evening, Saturday night, he knew Eppler would be at the offices of the Journal, wrangling with the final edits of Sunday’s edition. After dinner he and Mendel took their pages to the newspaper’s offices and made their plea. They wanted permission to typeset and print a hundred copies of the paper each week. They would come in after hours and use the outdated handpress that the Journal retained strictly for emergencies.

“You want me to make you a gift of the paper and ink?” Eppler said.

“Think of it as the Magyar Jewish Journal’s contribution to the welfare of forced laborers,” Mendel said.

“What about my welfare?” Eppler said. “My managing editor does nothing but grouse about finances as it is. What will he say when supplies begin to disappear?”

“Just tell him you’re suffering from war shortages.”

“We’re already suffering from war shortages!”

“Do it for Parisi,” Mendel said. “The mimeograph blurs his drawings terribly.”

Eppler regarded Andras’s illustrations through the shallow refraction of his horn-rimmed glasses. “That’s not a bad Hitler,” he said. “I should have made better use of you when you were working for me.”

“You’ll make good use of me when I work for you again,” Andras said.

“If you let us print The Crooked Rail, Parisi will swear to work for you when he’s done with the Munkaszolgálat,” Mendel said.

“I hope he’ll get himself back to school once he’s done with the Munkaszolgálat.”

“I’ll need to have some way to pay tuition,” Andras said.

Eppler blew a stuttering breath, took out a large pocket handkerchief and wiped his brow, then glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. “You can print fifty copies of your rag, and no more. Monday nights. Don’t let anyone catch you at it.”

“We kiss your hand, Eppler-úr,” Mendel said. “You’re a good man.”

“I’m a bitter and disillusioned man,” Eppler said. “But I like the idea that one of our presses might print a true word about the state we’re in.”

When Andras and Mendel presented Major Varsádi with the inaugural copy of The Crooked Rail, he gratified them by laughing so hard he was forced to remove his pocket handkerchief and wipe his eyes. He praised them for knowing how to make light of their situation, and opined that the other men might have something to learn from their attitude. The right state of mind, he said, pointing the burning tip of his cigar at them to make his point, could lighten any load. That night Andras brought home to Klara the news that they’d gotten permission to publish The Crooked Rail, and she gave him her reluctant blessing. The next day he and Mendel distributed fifty copies of the first issue, which spread as quickly and were consumed with as much relish as the first issues of The Snow Goose and The Biting Fly. Before long Varsádi began the practice of reading the paper aloud to the Munkaszolgálat officers who paid lunchtime visits to Szentendre Yard; Andras and Mendel could hear their laughter drifting down from the artificial hill where they took their long lunches.

Everyone at Szentendre wanted to make an appearance in the paper, even the foremen and guards who had seemed so stern in comparison to Varsádi. Their own squad foreman, Faragó, a mercurial man who liked to whistle American show tunes but had a habit of kicking his men from behind when his temper ran short, began to wink at Andras and Mendel in a companionate manner as they worked. To gratify him and avert his kicks, they wrote a piece entitled “Songbird of Szentendre,” a music review in which they praised his ability to reproduce any Broadway melody down to the thirty-second note. Their third week at the camp provided another fortuitous subject: The rail yard received a vast and mysterious shipment of ladies’ underthings, and the men had gotten them half loaded onto a train before anyone thought to wonder why the soldiers at the front might need a hundred and forty gross of reinforced German brassieres. The inspectors, giddy with the prospect of the black-market demand for those garments, appropriated three squads of labor servicemen to get the German brassieres off the train and into the covered trucks; at midday, the lunch break devolved into a fashion show of the latest support garments from the Reich. Labor servicemen and guards alike paraded in the stiff-cupped brassieres, pausing in front of Andras so he might capture their likenesses. Though the rest of the afternoon was consumed with a harder variant of labor-a half-dozen truckloads of small munitions arrived and had to be transferred to the trains-Andras scarcely felt the strain in his back or the shipping-crate splinters in his hands. He was considering the set of fashion drawings he might make-Berlin Chic angles into Budapest!-and calculating how long it might be before he and Mendel began to shift the paper toward their aim. As it turned out, the following week’s shipments provided the ideal material. For three days the supply trucks contained nothing but medical supplies, as if to stanch a great flow of blood in the east. As the soldiers transferred crates of morphine and suture to the black-market trucks, Andras thought of Tibor’s letters from his last company posting-No splints or casting materials or antibiotics, of course-and began to roll out a new section in his mind. “Complaints from the Front” it would be called, a series of letters from Munkaszolgálat conscripts in various states of illness and hunger and exposure, to which a representative of the KMOF would reply with admonitions to buck up and accept the hardships of war: Who did these whimpering fairies think they were? They should act like men, goddamn it, and consider that their suffering served the Magyar cause. Andras introduced the idea to Mendel that evening on the bus, and they mounted the series the following week, in a small box that ran on the back page.

By the end of the month an almost imperceptible shift had taken place among the ranks of the 79/6th. A few of the men seemed to be paying a different kind of attention to what went on each day in the inspection shed. In small huddled groups they watched the soldiers rushing to unload crates of food and clothing stamped with the KMOF logo. They followed the movement of the boxes from the train to the covered trucks, then watched the trucks depart through the rail-yard gates. Andras and Mendel, who had attained a certain status thanks to their role as publishers of The Crooked Rail, began to approach the groups and speak to a few of the men. In lowered voices they pointed out how little time the soldiers had to move the goods; a few small adjustments on the part of the laborers might delay the siphoning just long enough to get a few more bandages, a few more crates of overcoats, sent to the men at the front.