Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Two thousand, five thousand, a hundred thousand, I don’t care! This is not paid work, do you understand? If you wanted to pay, you should have gone to Behrenbohm or Speitzer. My services aren’t for sale.”

“If you don’t want money, what do you want?”

Klein shrugged. “I want this to work. And then I want do it again for someone else, and for someone else after that, until they stop me.”

“That’s not what you said when we first met you.”

“I was scared after the Struma,” Klein said. “I’m not scared anymore.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Things got worse. Paralyzing fear came to seem like a luxury.”

“What if you wanted to leave? My friend could help you get a visa.”

“I know. That’s good. I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You’ll keep it in mind? That’s all?”

He nodded at Andras and took the screwdriver from his belt again. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more work to do today. We’re done, unless you hear from me. You leave in two weeks.” He bent to the radio and began to loosen a screw that secured a copper wire to its base.

“So?” Andras said. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Klein said. “I’m not a sentimental person. If you want a long goodbye, talk to my grandmother.”

But Klein’s grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair. She’d finished embroidering the challah cover and had wrapped it in a piece of tissue paper, written Andras’s and Klara’s names on a little card, and affixed the card to the paper with a pin. Andras bent to her ear and whispered his thanks, but she didn’t wake. The goats made their remarks in the yard. From Klein’s room came a low curse and the clatter of a thrown tool. Andras tucked the parcel under his arm and let himself out without a sound.

And then it was the week before their journey. Andras and Mendel produced the last illustrated issue of The Crooked Rail, though Andras made Mendel promise that he would continue to publish until his own visa came through. The issue featured a faux interview with a star of Hungarian pornography, a crossword puzzle whose circled letters spelled the name of their own Major Károly Varsádi, and an optimistic economic column entitled “Black Market Review,” in which all indicators pointed to an unending series of lucrative shipments. “Ask Hitler,” which had become a permanent fixture of the newspaper, carried only one letter that week:

D EAR H ITLER: When will this hot weather end? Sincerely, S UNSTRUCK.

D EAR S UNSTRUCK: It’ll end when I goddamn say it will, and not a moment sooner! Heil me, H ITLER.

In midweek, Andras’s parents came to Budapest to see their children and grandchildren once more before they left. They went to dinner at the new residence of the Hász family, a high-ceilinged apartment with crumbling plaster moldings and a parquet floor in the herringbone pattern called points de Hongrie. It had been nearly five years now, Andras realized, since he’d studied parquetry at the École Spéciale; five years since he’d learned what kind of wood suited each design, and replicated the patterns in his sketchbook. Now here he was in this apartment with his stricken parents, his fierce and lovely wife, his baby son, preparing to say goodbye to Europe altogether. The architecture of this apartment mattered only insofar as it reminded him of what he would leave behind.

His brother and Ilana arrived, their boy asleep in Ilana’s arms. They sat close together on the sofa while József perched beside them on a gold chair and smoked one of his mother’s cigarettes. Andras’s father perused a tiny book of psalms, marking a few for his sons to repeat along the journey. The elder Mrs. Hász made conversation with Andras’s mother, who had learned that her own sister knew the remnant of Mrs. Hász’s family that remained in Kaba, not far from Konyár. György arrived from work, his shirtfront damp with perspiration, and kissed Andras’s mother and shook hands with Béla. Elza Hász ushered them all into the dining room and begged them to take their places at the table.

The room was decorated as if for a party. There were tapers in silver candelabra, clusters of roses in blue glass bowls, decanters of tawny wine, the gold-rimmed plates with their design of birds. Andras’s father made the blessing over the bread, and the usual grim serving man stepped forward to fill their plates. At first the conversation was about trivial things: the fluctuating prices of lumber, the almanac’s predictions of an early fall, the scandalous relationship between a certain member of parliament and a former star of the silent screen. But inevitably the conversation turned to the war. The morning papers had reported that German U-boats had sunk a million tons of British-American shipping that summer, seven hundred thousand tons in July alone. And the news from Russia was no better: The Hungarian Second Army, after a bloody battle at Voronezh in early July, was now pushing onward in the wake of the German Sixth toward Stalingrad. The Hungarian Second Army had already paid a heavy toll to support its ally. It had lost, György had read, more than nine hundred officers and twenty thousand soldiers. No one mentioned what they were all thinking: that there were fifty thousand labor servicemen attached to the Hungarian Second Army, nearly all of them Jewish, and that if the Hungarian Second had fared badly, the labor battalions were certain to have fared worse. From the street below, like a note of punctuation, came the familiar gold-toned clang of the streetcar bell. It was a sound peculiar to Budapest, a sound amplified and made resonant by the walls of the buildings that lined the streets. Andras couldn’t help but think of that other departure five years earlier, the one that had brought him from Budapest to Paris and to Klara. The journey that lay ahead now was more desperate but strangely less frightening; between himself and the terror of the unknown lay the comfort of Klara’s presence, and Tibor’s. And at the other end of the journey would be Rosen and Shalhevet, and the prospect of hard work he wanted to do, and the promise of an unfamiliar variety of freedom. Mendel Horovitz might join them in a few months; Andras’s parents might follow soon after. In Palestine his son would never have to wear a yellow armband or live in fear of his neighbors. He himself might finish his architecture training. He couldn’t help feeling a kind of pity for József Hász, who would remain here in Budapest and struggle on alone in Company 79/6 of the Munkaszolgálat.

“You ought to be coming to Palestine, Hász,” he said. The journey to the Middle East would make Andras better traveled than József, a fact he had apprehended with a certain satisfaction.

“You wouldn’t want me,” József said flatly. “I’d be a terrible traveling companion. I’d get seasick. I’d complain constantly. And that would just be the beginning. I’d be useless in Palestine. I can’t plant trees or build houses. In any case, my mother can’t spare me, can you, Mother?”

Mrs. Hász looked first at Andras’s mother and then at her own dinner plate. “Maybe you’ll change your mind,” she said. “Maybe you’ll come with us when we go.”

“Please, Mother,” József said. “How long will you keep up that pretense? You’re not going to Palestine. You won’t even get into a boat at Lake Balaton.”

“No one’s pretending,” his mother said. “Your father and I mean to go as soon as our visas arrive. We certainly can’t stay here.”

“Grandmother,” József said. “Tell my mother she’s out of her mind.”

“I certainly will not,” said the elder Mrs. Hász. “I intend to go myself. I’ve always wanted to see the Holy Land.”

“See it, then. But don’t live there. We’re Hungarians, not desert Bedouins.”