Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“We were a tribal people before we were Hungarians,” Tibor said. “Don’t forget that.”

“Pardon me, Doctor,” József said. He liked to call Tibor “Doctor” as much as he liked to call Andras “Uncle.” “And before that we were hunters and gatherers in Africa. So perhaps we should bypass the Holy Land altogether and proceed directly to the darkest Congo.”

“József,” György said.

“A thousand pardons, Father. I’m sure you’d rather I kept quiet. But it’s hard, you know, to be the only sane person in the asylum.”

Béla shifted in his delicate chair, feeling the pull of his city suit against his shoulders. He was thinking that he would have liked to take the younger Hász by the shoulders and shake him. He wondered how the boy could dare speak so flippantly about what was about to befall Andras and Tibor and their wives and sons. If one of his own sons had spoken that way, Béla would have risen from his chair and given him a good tongue-lashing, even before guests. But he would never have raised a child who spoke that way. Not he, nor Flóra. She put a hand on his wrist now as if she could see what was in his mind; he wasn’t surprised she understood. Everyone could see that the boy was intolerable. At least Klara’s mother had spoken to him sternly. Béla looked across the table at her, that grave gray-eyed woman who had lost and regained her child once already and now seemed stoic at the prospect of losing her again. They had raised fine children, this woman and Béla and Flóra. He didn’t wonder anymore at the connection between Andras and Klara; he knew now that they were made of the same stuff, whatever luxuries the girl had had as a child. There she was, sitting calm as grass with the baby in her arms, looking as though she were about to take a trip to the countryside rather than down a dangerous river and across a torpedo-salted sea. He told himself to take note of that tranquil look of hers, that radiant calm; in the days and weeks ahead he would want to remember it.

…

That week, their last in Budapest, was the hottest yet of the summer. On Thursday the bus to Szentendre was stifling even at six in the morning; this was the kind of day Andras’s mother called gombás-idő- mushroom-growing weather. A damp wind blew through the channel of the Danube. Birds hustled through the wet turbulence of air, and the trees across the water flashed the white undersides of their leaves. All that week, it seemed, the command ranks at Szentendre had been out of sorts. The same foremen who’d failed to take note of the subtle slackening of work now began to drive the laborers relentlessly. Ill temper seemed to have spread through the camp like a fever. There had been a series of arguments in the officers’ headquarters between Major Varsádi and the black-market inspectors, with the result that Varsádi had unleashed a rare storm of anger upon his lieutenants; the lieutenants had behaved vilely to the guards and work foremen, and the foremen, in turn, swore at the labor servicemen, kicked them, and sliced at their backs and legs with doubled lengths of packing rope.

That morning there was to be an inspection lineup before work began. The men had been instructed in advance that their uniforms and equipment were to be in top shape. Beginning at seven o’clock, the men were made to stand at attention beside the tracks for what seemed an interminable length of time. Rain began to fall, a barrage of fat hard drops that penetrated the fabric of the men’s clothing. The waiting went on and on; the guards paced the rows of men, as bored as their charges.

“What a waste of time,” József said. “Why don’t they just send us home?”

“Hear hear,” Mendel said. “Cut us loose.”

“Quiet there, both of you,” a guard called to them.

Andras kept an eye on the low brick building that housed Varsádi’s headquarters. Through a steam-hazed window he could make out the commander holding a phone receiver to his ear. Andras rocked back and forth from his heels to the balls of his feet; he studied the stippling of rain on the back of the man in front of him. In his mind he reviewed the tasks that lay ahead in next few days: the final packing, the rechecking of their lists of clothing and supplies, the tying up and locking of the suitcases, the departure from their apartment on Nefelejcs utca, the midnight meeting at Tibor’s, the walk to the point just north of the Erzsébet Bridge where a barge would be waiting, their consignment to the damp dark hiding place where they would huddle together as the barge slipped into the current. He was there in his mind, so thoroughly hidden in the hold of that Danube barge, that at first he didn’t notice the rumble of trucks on the road. He felt a low vibration in his sternum and thought, More thunder. But the rumble continued and increased, and when he looked up at last he saw a six-truck convoy bearing Hungarian soldiers. The trucks roared through the gates of Szentendre Yard, their tires turning up dry dust beneath the rain-damp surface of the road. They parked on the bare stretch of earth that lay between the tracks and the officers’ building. The soldiers in back carried rifles fixed with bayonets; Andras could see the blades glinting in the olive-colored gloom of the canvas enclosures. When the trucks stopped, the soldiers jumped out onto the muddy gravel and held their weapons loosely at their sides. The officers in the first truck went into the low brick building, and the door closed behind them.

The work servicemen eyed the soldiers. There must have been fifty of them at least. With their officers occupied inside headquarters, the soldiers leaned their rifles against the trucks and began to smoke. One of them pulled out a deck of cards and dealt poker. Another group of men clustered around a newspaper while one of the soldiers read the headlines aloud.

“What’s going on?” whispered the man beside Andras, a tall hairless man who had been dubbed the Ivory Tower. He had been a history professor at the university; like Zoltán Novak he had been recruited to the Munkaszolgálat to fill a quota of Jewish luminaries. He was new to the work service, and had not yet learned to accept its mysteries and contradictions without protest.

“I don’t know,” Andras said. “We’ll find out.”

“Silence in the lines!” shouted a guard.

The wait continued. Some of the guards drifted toward the soldiers to trade cigarettes and news. A few of them seemed to know each other. They slapped each other on the back and shook hands. Another half hour passed, and still no one emerged from the headquarters. Finally the guards’ captain gave the command for the labor servicemen to be at ease. They could eat or smoke if they wanted. Andras and Mendel sat down on a damp railroad tie and opened their tin lunch pails, and József drew a slim leather case from his breast pocket and extracted a cigarette.

A moment later, the door of the squat brick building opened and the officers emerged-first the army officers in their crisp brass-buttoned uniforms, then the familiar Munkaszolgálat officers who had commanded them since the beginning of their time at Szentendre. Varsádi’s first lieutenant blew a whistle and ordered the servicemen to stand at attention. There was a moment of rustling confusion as the men put away their lunches. Then the sergeant shouted his orders: The men were to form ranks at the supply trucks and move the goods to the boxcars as quickly as possible.

If it hadn’t been for the presence of the soldiers, their bayonets needling skyward as if to pierce the underbellies of the low-hanging clouds, it would have seemed like any other afternoon at Szentendre Yard. The 79/6th carried crates of ammunition across the same expanse of gravel they’d crossed and recrossed a thousand times. If the guards kept a tighter rein on the men, if the officers were more strident as they shouted their orders, it seemed only an extension of the animus that had permeated the command ranks all week. Faragó, their foreman, failed to whistle a single show tune; instead he shouted Siessetek! in his thin tenor and wondered aloud how he’d been cursed with the command of such slugs, such turtles.