Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

By the next week, almost unnoticeably, the 79/6th had begun to drag its feet as it loaded goods onto the boxcars. The change happened slowly enough and subtly enough that the foremen failed to notice a general trend. But Andras and Mendel could see it. They watched with a kind of quiet triumph, and compared their impressions in whispered conferences on the bus. All indications suggested that the small shift they’d hoped for had come to pass. Their conversations with the other men confirmed it. There was no way to know, of course, whether the change would make a difference to the men at the front, but it was something, at least: a tiny act of protest, a sole unit of drag inside the vast machine that was the Labor Service. The following week, when they brought the news to Frigyes Eppler at the Journal, he clapped them on the shoulders, offered them shots of rye from the bottle in his office, and took credit for the whole thing.

On Sundays, when Andras was free from Szentendre Yard, he and Klara went to lunch at the house on Benczúr utca, which had been stripped by now of all but its most essential furnishings. As they dined in the garden at a long table spread with white linen, Andras had the sense that he had fallen into a different life altogether. He didn’t understand how it was possible that he could have spent Saturday loading sacks of flour and crates of weapons into boxcars, and was now spending Sunday drinking sweet Tokaji wine and eating filets of Balatoni fogas in lemon sauce. József Hász would sometimes show up at these Sunday family dinners, often with his girlfriend, the lank-limbed daughter of a real-estate magnate. Zsófia was her name. They had been childhood friends, playmates at Lake Balaton, where their families had owned neighboring summer houses. The two of them would sit on a bench in a corner of the garden and smoke thin dark cigarettes, their heads bent close together as they talked. György Hász detested smoking. He would have sent József to smoke in the street if the girl hadn’t been with him. As it was, he pretended not to see them with their cigarettes. It was one of many pretenses that complicated the afternoons they spent at Benczúr utca. Sometimes it was difficult to keep track, so numerous were they. There was the pretense that Andras hadn’t spent the rest of the week loading freight cars at Szentendre while József painted at his atelier in Buda; the pretense that Klara’s long exile in France had never occurred; the pretense that she was safe now, and that the purpose of the gradual but steady disappearance of the family’s paintings and rugs and ornaments, of the younger Mrs. Hász’s jewelry and all but the most necessary servants, of the car and its driver, the piano and its gilded stool, the priceless old books and the inlaid furniture, was not to keep Klara out of the hands of the authorities but to keep József out of the Munkaszolgálat.

It was a testament to József’s egotism that he considered himself worth his family’s sacrifices. His own luxuries were undiminished. In his large bright flat in Buda, he lived among gleanings from the family home: antique rugs and furniture and crystal he’d removed before the slow, steady drain had begun. Andras had seen the flat once, a few months after the baby had been born, when they’d gone for an evening visit. József had provided them with a dinner ordered from Gundel, the famous old restaurant in the city park; he’d held the baby on his knee while Andras and Klara ate roasted game hens and white asparagus salad and a mushroom galette. He praised the shape of his baby cousin’s head and hands and declared that he looked exactly like his mother. József’s manner toward Andras was breezy and careless, though it had never quite lost the edge of resentment it had acquired when Andras had delivered the news of his relationship with Klara. It was József’s habit to mask any social discomfort with humor; Andras was Uncle Andras now, as often as József could find occasion to say his name. After dinner he took Andras and Klara into the north-facing room he used as his studio, where large canvases were propped against the walls. Four of his previous works had been sold recently, he said; through a family connection he’d begun working with Móric Papp, the Váci utca dealer who supplied Hungary’s elite with contemporary art. Andras noted with chagrin that József’s work had improved considerably since his student days in Paris. His collage paintings-nets of dark color thrown against backgrounds of fine-ground black gravel and scraps of old road signs and pieces of railroad track-might be called good, might even be seen as evocative of the uncertainty and terror into which Europe had plunged. When Andras praised the work, József responded as though accepting what was due to him. It had taken all of Andras’s effort to remain civil through the evening.

On Sunday afternoons at Benczúr utca, when József and his Zsófia joined the group at the table, what he generally had to talk about was how dull it was in Budapest during the warmer months-how much nicer it would have been at Lake Balaton, and what they’d be doing that very moment if they were there. He and Zsófia would start in on some memory from when they were children-how her brother had sailed them far out into the lake in a leaking boat, how they’d gotten sick from eating unripe melons, how József had tried to ride Zsófia’s pony and had been thrown off into a blackberry bramble-and Zsófia would laugh, and the elder Mrs. Hász would smile and nod, remembering it all, and György and his wife would exchange a look, because it was the summer house that had kept József out of the labor service, after all.

One Sunday in early June, they arrived to find József’s usual bench unoccupied. For Andras, the prospect of an afternoon without him was a relief. Tibor and Ilana had arrived some time earlier, and Ilana played in the grass with young Ádám while Tibor sat beside them on a wicker chaise longue, fixing the bent brim of Ilana’s sun hat. Andras fell into a chair beside his brother. It was a hot and cloudless day, one of a series; the new grass had gone limp for want of rain. The week at Szentendre had been an unusually grueling one, bearable only because Andras knew that on Sunday he’d be sitting in this shady garden, drinking cold soda water flavored with raspberry syrup. Klara sat down on the grass with Ilana, holding Tamás on her lap. The babies stared at each other in their usual manner, as if astonished at the revelation that another baby existed in the world. The younger Mrs. Hász emerged from the house with a bottle of seltzer, a miniature pitcher of ruby-colored syrup, and half a dozen glasses. Andras sighed and closed his eyes, waiting for a glass of raspberry soda to materialize on the low table beside him.

“Where’s your son today?” Tibor asked Elza Hász.

“In the study with his father.”

Andras caught a note of tension in her voice, and he emerged from his torpor to watch her closely as she handed the glasses of soda around. The past five years had aged her. Her dark hair, still cut fashionably short, was shot with silver now; the faint lines beside her eyes had grown deeper. She had lost weight since he’d last seen her-whether from worry or from undereating, he didn’t know. He wondered with some anxiety what György and József might be discussing in the study. He could hear their voices coming through the open windows-György’s low, grave tones, József’s higher notes of indignation. A few minutes later József burst through the French doors and crossed the terra-cotta paving stones of the patio, then strode over the lawn toward his mother, who had seated herself in a low garden chair. When he reached her, he gave her a look so charged with fury that she got to her feet.

“Say you haven’t agreed to this,” he demanded.