Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

After the drought broke, the journey began to take shape. Klein had identified a barge captain named Szabó who would take them as far as the Romanian border, and another, Ivanescu, who would conduct them to Constanţa; he booked them passage under the family name of Gedalya aboard the Trasnet, a former fishing boat that had been converted into a refugee-smuggling vessel. They must be prepared to be crowded and hungry, overheated, dehydrated, seasick, delayed for days in Turkish ports where they could not take the risk of disembarking; they must bring with them only what was necessary. They should be glad they were undertaking the trip in summer, when the seas were calm. They would travel through the Bosporus past Istanbul, through the Marmara Denizi and into the Aegean Sea; from there they would move into the Mediterranean, and if they evaded the patrol boats and submarines they would dock three days later at Haifa. From start to finish the journey would take two weeks, if all went well. They would leave on August second.

Klara had an old-fashioned wooden wall calendar painted with the image of a bluebird on a cherry branch. Three diminutive windows showed day, date, and month; each morning Andras rolled the little wheels forward before he left for Szentendre Yard. He rolled July through its thunderstorm-drenched days, from single digits into teens, as plans for the trip went forward. They assembled clothing, boots, hats; they packed and repacked suitcases, trying to determine the densest possible arrangement of their belongings. On Sunday afternoons they walked the city together, packing their minds with the things they wanted to remember: the green haze of river-cooled air around Margaret Island; the thrumming vibration of cars crossing the Széchenyi Bridge; the smells of cut grass and hot-spring sulfur in the Városliget; the dry concrete pan of the skating pond; the long gray Danube embankment where Andras had walked with his brother a lifetime ago, when they were recent gimnázium graduates living in a room on Hársfa utca. There was the synagogue where he and Klara had been married, the hospital where their son had been born, the small bright studio where Klara taught her private students. There was their own apartment on Nefelejcs utca, the first place they’d ever lived together. And then there were the haunted places they would not visit in farewell: the house on Benczúr utca, which now stood empty in preparation for the arrival of the son of the minister of justice; the Opera House, with its echoing corridors; the patch of pavement in an alley where what had happened long ago had happened.

One Sunday, two weeks before the second of August, Andras went alone to see Klein. The packet of entry visas had arrived from Palestine. That was the last thing they needed to complete their dossier, that set of crisp white documents imprinted with the seal of the British Home Office and the Star of David stamp of the Yishuv. Klein would make facsimile copies, which he would keep in case anything happened to the originals. When Andras arrived, Klein’s grandfather was in the yard, feeding the goats. He put a hand to his hat.

“You’ll be off soon,” he said.

“Fourteen more days.”

“I knew the boy would take care of things.”

“He seems to have a talent for it.”

“That’s our boy. He’s like his father was, always planning, planning, working with his gadgets, making things happen. His father was an inventor, a man whose name everyone would have known, if he’d lived.” He told Andras that Klein’s parents had died of influenza when Klein was still in short pants; they were the man and woman depicted in the photograph, as Andras had guessed. Another child might have been destroyed by the loss, the elder Klein said, but not Miklós. He’d gotten top marks in school, particularly in the social sciences, and had grown up to become a kind of inventor in his own right-a creator of possibilities where none existed.

“What a stroke of luck it was that we found him,” Andras said.

“May your luck continue,” the grandfather said. He spat thrice and knocked on the wooden lintel of the goat house. “May your journey to Palestine be exceptional only for its tedium.”

Andras tipped his cap to the elder Klein and walked the stone path to the door. Klein’s grandmother was there in the front room, sitting in the armchair with an embroidery hoop in her lap. The design, embroidered in tiny gold Xs, showed a braided challah and the word Shabbos in Hebrew letters.

“It’s for your table in the holy land,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Andras said. “It’s too fine.” He thought of their packed and repacked suitcases, into which not a single thing more could possibly fit.

But nothing could be hidden from Klein’s grandmother. “Your wife can sew it into the lining of her summer coat,” she said. “It’s got a good luck charm in it.”

“Where?”

She showed him two minuscule Hebrew letters cross-stitched into the end of the challah. “It’s the number eighteen. Chai. Life.”

Andras nodded his thanks. “It’s very kind of you,” he said. “You’ve been a help to us all along.”

“The boy’s waiting for you in his room. Go on.”

In his file-crowded den, Klein sat on the bed with his hair in wild disorder, shirtless, a radio disemboweled on the blanket before him. If he had been disheveled and ripe-smelling the first time Andras had met him, now, after a month of planning their escape, he seemed on his way to a prehistoric state of existence. His beard had grown in scraggly and black. Andras couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him wear a shirt. His smell was reminiscent of the barracks in Subcarpathia. Had it not been for the open window and the breeze that riffled the topmost papers on the stacks, no one could have remained in that room for long. And yet, there on the desk was a cleared-away space in which a crisp folder lay open, a coded travel itinerary stapled to one side, a fat sheaf of instructions on the other. Gedalya, their code name, on the tab. And in Andras’s hand the final piece, the packet of documents that would complete the puzzle, the legal element of their illegal flight. Never before the planning of this trip had he imagined what a byzantine maze might lie between emigration and immigration. Klein tucked a tiny screwdriver into his belt and raised his eyebrows at Andras. Andras put the documents into his lap.

“Genuine,” Klein said, touching the raised letters of the British seal. His dark-circled eyes met Andras’s own. “Well, that’s it. You’re ready.”

“We haven’t talked about money.”

“Yes, we have.” Klein reached for the folder and extracted a page torn from an accountant’s notebook, a list of figures penned in his thin left-sloping script. The cost of false papers, in case they were discovered. The fees for the barge captains and the fishing-boat captains and their part of the petrol for the journey and the cost of food and water and the extra money set aside for bribes, and the harbor fees and taxes and the cost of extra insurance, because so many boats had accidentally been torpedoed in the Mediterranean in recent months. Everything to be paid in person, incrementally, along the way. “We’ve been through it all,” he said.

“I mean your fee,” Andras said. “We haven’t talked about that.”

Klein scowled. “Don’t insult me.”

“I’m not insulting you.”

“Do I look like I need anything?”

“A shirt,” Andras said. “A bath. Maybe a new radio.”

“I won’t take money from you.”

“That’s absurd.”

“That’s the way it is.”

“Maybe you won’t take it for yourself. But take it for your grandparents.”

“They’ve got all they need.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Andras said. “We can give you two thousand pengő. Think what that could mean.”