Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Major Varsádi strode toward József, pistol in hand. He took the gun by its short muzzle and delivered two swift blows with the butt-end across József’s face. A bright stuttering dart of blood appeared on the shoulder of Andras’s uniform.

“Take my advice and shut your mouth,” Varsádi said. “Where you’re going, you’d be shot for less.”

The major gave another order; the soldiers tightened their lines around the labor servicemen and squeezed them toward the train cars. Andras found himself jammed between Mendel and József. Behind them was a crush of men. They had no choice but to climb into the open mouth of the boxcar. Through the single high window Andras could see the soldiers in a line around the cars, the dull glint of their bayonets against the marbled sky. More and more servicemen were pushed into the cars until the air seemed to be made of them. Andras inhaled wet canvas and hair oil and sweat, the smell of the morning’s work cut with the tang of panic. His heart drummed in his ribcage, and his throat closed with terror. Klara would be home now, packing the last of their things. In an hour she would begin to look at the clock. He had to get off the train. He would plead illness; he would offer a bribe. He shoved and elbowed his way toward the door again, but before he could reach that rectangle of light there was an all-clear cry. Then the rattle of the door sliding closed, the descent of darkness, the sound of a chain against metal, the unmistakable click of a padlock.

A moment later the train whistle let out an indifferent screech. Through the wooden floorboards, through the soles of his summer boots and the bones of his legs, came a deep mechanical shudder, the first grinding jolt of motion. The men fell against each other, against Andras; the weight of them seemed heavy enough to squeeze his heart to stillness in his chest. And then the train lurched into its rhythm and carried them forward through the north gates of Szentendre Yard, toward a destination none of them could name.

IN THE DAYS and nights he spent on the train, after he’d shouted himself hoarse with protest and exhausted all hope of escape, a kind of numbness seemed to overtake him. He stood with Mendel for hours at the small high window, watching the world pass by outside like a catalogue of the impossible: That motorbike, with its suggestion of a quick escape. That road, and the freedom to follow it home to Klara. That mail truck, which might carry a letter to her. He knew from the direction of the light that they were headed northeast. He would have known it anyway because the train was climbing. They ascended into the northern uplands through Gyöngyös and Füzesabony; at times the train crawled, and at other times it stopped for hours. Each time it stopped, Andras thought they might be led off to their new work site. On the second night they were actually ordered to leave the train, and herded into an empty warehouse that must have once been used to store the red wine of the region, Egri Bikavér, bull’s blood. The air had the sweet oaky tang of wine barrels; the dirt floor was stained with faded purple rings. Two army cooks fed them a thin cabbage soup and hunks of hard dark bread, the familiar Munkaszolgálat food. They stood in line to wash at a spigot in a corner of the warehouse. They weren’t allowed to speak to each other, or to venture outside, not even for a piss; they had to use a barrel for that. The warehouse door was locked, the building guarded by soldiers. In the morning they were put back on the train and sent east again.

That was the third day of travel. He was supposed to have embarked for Palestine the next morning. What would Klara be doing now? He knew it was futile to hope she would have gone on without him. What would she have thought two nights before, when the hour grew later and later and he hadn’t come home? He imagined her bending over the valises, packing the baby’s things, checking the clock on the dresser; he imagined her mild worry when the usual hour of his return had passed-had he stopped to have a last drink in Budapest with Mendel, or a last stroll through the familiar streets? The dinner she’d made would have grown cold in the kitchen. She would have put Tamás to bed, her worry shading into fear as eight o’clock became nine, and nine became ten.

What did she imagine had happened to him? Did she think he’d been thrown in jail or killed? Had the work-service administration told her anything, even now? In all probability she still didn’t know. And what about Varsádi’s threat? Would he be content when his men found the originals of The Crooked Rail at Eppler’s offices, or would he insist that the apartment be searched too?

There was constant speculation on the train about where they were going and what awaited them at the end of the journey. The prevailing opinion was that there had been some mistake about the company’s transfer. They were supposed to have been sent northwest to Esztergom at the end of the month, to work at another rail yard. The orders must have gotten confused. The mix-up would soon be discovered, and they would be put on a westbound train. But that didn’t explain why soldiers had been sent to Szentendre Yard to load the men onto the trains, nor why they’d been shipped off with such haste. The Ivory Tower, the former professor of history, offered another theory: He believed they were being sent east because they had all been witness to a crime, the slow and systematic diversion of millions of pengős’ worth of goods into the black market. The government had begun a campaign to rout out military embezzlement, the Ivory Tower said. The stealing of goods intended for use on the battlefront was considered an act of treason punishable by death. A panic had spread among the labor service company commanders, who were the worst offenders of all. The Jewish labor servicemen could not be trusted to vouch for the innocence of officers who had abused them daily; instead they had to be shunted away out of sight, perhaps even to the Eastern Front.

József was terrified. Andras could see it. He hardly spoke. He kept to himself, gingerly touching his face where Varsádi had struck him. He never slept, not that Andras saw; he sat up all night sorting and rearranging the few items in his pack. He wouldn’t crack a joke. He wouldn’t eat the Munkaszolgálat food, preferring instead to pick at a crust of challah left over from the last lunch he’d brought to Szentendre. He refused at first to use the communal toilet can in the corner of the train; when necessity forced him to use it at last, he returned looking as though he’d been beaten.

Day became night again and the train went on. There was no stop for food or water. There was no respite from the heat. The men couldn’t lie down; there wasn’t room. They could take turns sitting on the floor of the boxcar or raising their faces to the window. There was some relief in those moments when they could breathe fresh air. But by the fourth day there was no way to ignore the deepening stink nor the clawing thirst that had come upon them, and Andras began to wonder if the true purpose of the trip was to keep them on the train until they died of thirst. In the haze of his dehydration, he came to understand that it was all his fault that they were imprisoned on this eastbound train. The Crooked Rail, however tongue-in-cheek, had in fact documented Szentendre’s involvement in the black market; it had made the situation known to any labor serviceman too blind or naïve to see it on his own, and might well have spread word of the operation beyond Szentendre. Klara had been right; he’d taken an absurd and unnecessary risk. The paper might have been a slender tree in a forest of incriminating evidence, but there it was nonetheless. Varsádi considered it important enough to have called a private conference with Andras and Mendel, important enough to have threatened them with a gun. If fifty copies of the paper hadn’t made their way among the men each week, and perhaps out into the city, would Varsádi have been transformed from a tippling laxard into a man willing to send an entire company to the front just to save his own skin?