Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

He sat in the kitchen and waited for her to come out. He waited as the shadows of the furniture lengthened across the kitchen floor and climbed the eastern wall. He made coffee and drank it. He tried to look at a newspaper but couldn’t concentrate. He waited, his hands folded in his lap, and when he got tired of waiting he went down the hallway and stood outside the door. He put a hand on the doorknob. It turned in his fingers, and there was Klara on the other side. The baby was asleep on the bed, his arms flung over his head as if in surrender. Klara’s eyes were pink, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked exactly as Elisabet had looked when Andras had gone to see if he could coax her from her room on the rue de Sévigné. She held one arm across her chest, cupping her shoulder as if it were sore. Her footsteps had sounded on the bedroom floor for hours; all that time she must have been pacing with the baby.

“Come sit with me,” Andras said, taking her hand. He led her to the front room and brought her to the sofa, then sat down with her, keeping her hand in his own.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you.”

She looked down at his hand, closed around her own, and pushed the back of her other hand across her eyes. “I let myself think it was over,” she said. “We came back here and made a different life. I wasn’t afraid anymore. Or at least I didn’t fear the things I’d feared when I left here the first time.”

“That was what I wanted,” Andras said. “I didn’t want you to be afraid.”

“You should have trusted me to do what was right,” she said. “I wouldn’t have endangered our child. I wouldn’t have tried to leave the country while you were away in the Munkaszolgálat.”

“But what would you have done? What are we going to do now?”

“We’re going to go,” she said. “We’re all going to go, before György loses what’s left. Even if he can’t keep the house, he’s not destitute yet. There’s a great deal that might still be saved. We’re going to go talk to that Klein, you and I, and we’re going to ask him to arrange the trip. We have to try to get to Palestine. From there it might be easier to get to the United States.”

“You’re going to give up the building in Paris.”

“Of course,” she said. “Think of how much my brother’s already lost.”

“But how will we get them to stop dunning him? If you flee, won’t they go after him to tell them where you are?”

“He’s got to come too. He’s got to sell whatever’s left and get out as soon as he can.”

“And your mother? And my parents? And Mátyás? We can’t leave without knowing what’s happened to him. We’ve talked about this, Klara. We can’t do it.”

“We’ll take our parents. We’ll arrange for Mátyás to have passage too, if he returns in time.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then we’ll speak to Klein and arrange for him to join us when he does return.”

“Listen to me. Hundreds of people have died trying to get to Palestine.”

“I understand. But we have to try. If we stay, they’ll bleed the family of everything. And in the end they might not be satisfied with the money.”

Andras sat silent for a long moment. “You know how Tibor feels about this,” he said. “He wanted us to go a long time ago.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Her chest rose and fell beneath the drape of her blouse. “You have to understand,” she said. “I can’t stay here and allow us, or my family, to be done to this way. I didn’t then. And I won’t now.”

He did understand. Of course he’d known this about her: It was her nature. This was why György hadn’t told her. They were going to have to leave Hungary. They would sell the property in Paris; they would go to Klein and beg him to arrange one last trip. That night they would begin to plan how it might be done. But for the moment there was nothing more to say. He took her hand again and she held his gaze, and he knew, too, that she understood why he’d kept the truth from her for so many months.

IN THE WEEKS that followed, he tried not to think about the Struma. He tried not to think about the deceived passengers who found themselves aboard a wreck of a ship, ill-provisioned and ill-equipped for the journey. He tried not to think about the prospect of their own passage down the Danube, the constant fear of discovery, his wife and son suffering for lack of food and water; he tried not to think about leaving his brother and his parents behind in Europe. He tried to think only of the necessity of getting out, and the means for arranging the trip. He wired Rosen to tell him of the change in their situation, the new urgency that had come upon them. Two weeks later, a reply came via air mail with the news that Shalhevet had secured six emergency visas-six!-enough for Andras and Klara, Tibor and Ilana, and the children. Once they arrived in Palestine, he wrote, it would be easier to arrange visas for the others-for Mendel Horovitz, who would be so valuable to the Yishuv; and for György and Elza and Andras’s parents and the rest of the family. There was no time to celebrate the news; there was too much to be done. Klara had to write to her solicitor in Paris to hasten the sale of the property. Andras had to write to his parents to explain what was happening, and why. And they had to see Klein.

It was Klara’s idea that they should go together, all six of them. She believed he might be more inclined to help if he met the people he’d be saving. They arranged to go on a Sunday afternoon; they dressed in visiting clothes and pushed the babies in their perambulators. Klara and Ilana walked ahead, their summer hats dipping toward each other like two bellflowers. Andras and Tibor followed. They might have been any Hungarian family out for a Sunday stroll. No one would have guessed that they were missing a seventh, a brother who was lost in Ukraine. No one would have guessed that they were trying to arrange an illegal flight from Europe. In her pocketbook Klara carried a telegram from her solicitor, stating that her property on the rue de Sévigné would be listed for ninety thousand francs, and that the transfer of the money from the sale, though difficult, might be accomplished through his contacts in Vienna, who had contacts in Budapest. Nothing would be done in Klara’s name; ownership of the building had already been officially transferred to the non-Jewish solicitor himself, because it had become illegal for Jews to own real estate in occupied France. Everyone would have to be paid along the way, of course, but if the sale went well, there would still be some seventy thousand francs left over. No one would have known, looking at Klara as she walked along Váci út that Sunday afternoon-her fine-boned back held straight, her features composed under the pale blue shadow of her hat-how unhappy she’d been two nights earlier as she’d drafted a telegram to her solicitor, instructing him to make the sale. It had been a long time since she and Andras had imagined they might go back someday to reclaim their Paris lives. But the apartment and the studio were real things that still belonged to her, things that marked out a territory for her in the city that had been her home for seventeen years. The property had made the impossible seem possible; it made them believe that everything might change, that they might return someday. The decision to sell the building carried a sense of finality. They were giving up that source of hope in order to fund a desperate journey that might fail, to a place that was utterly foreign to them-an embattled desert territory ruled by the British. But they had made their decision. They would try. And so Klara had written to her solicitor, directing him to forward the proceeds of the sale to his agents in Vienna and Budapest.