Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

He had to think of Klara, he told himself. He had to think of Tamás. And his parents, and Tibor, and Mátyás. He had to pretend it wasn’t hopeless; he had to allow himself to be fooled into staying alive. He had to make himself a willing party to the insidious trick of love.

At the end of Andras’s second week in Turka, the road surveyor’s assistant was killed by a land mine. It happened at the cusp of the new road, a few kilometers from Andras’s work site, but word traveled quickly through the line of work teams. The surveyor’s assistant had been one of them, a labor serviceman. He’d been helping the surveyor map the road through a Soviet minefield. The field was supposed to have been cleared months earlier by another labor company, but that group must have been anxious to call the job finished. The assistant had tripped the mine as he’d been setting up the tripod. The explosion had killed him instantly.

The surveyor was a work serviceman too, an engineer from Szeged. Andras had seen him pass by on his way to the surveying site. He was short and pallid, with rimless spectacles and a brushy gray moustache; his uniform jacket was just as threadbare as anyone else’s, his boots wrapped with rags to keep them from falling apart. But because his function was so important to the army, he had an official-looking hat and an insignia on the pocket of his overcoat. He was allowed to buy things in town and to smoke cigarettes. And he was always being called upon to interpret for someone: He knew Polish, Russian, even some Ukrainian, and could speak to any Galician peasant in his native tongue. His assistant, a slim dark-eyed boy who couldn’t have been more than twenty, had been a silent shadow at his heels. After the boy died, the surveyor tore his sleeve in mourning and rubbed his face with ashes. He dragged his equipment to and from the surveying site with an expression of abstracted despair. The boy had been like a son to him, everyone said; in fact, Andras learned later, he had been the son of the surveyor’s closest friend in Szeged.

As August rolled forward, it became clear that the surveyor would have to choose a new assistant soon. He was too old to drag the equipment around by himself; someone would have to help him if the road were to be marked out to Skhidnytsya by the time the German inspectors arrived in November. The surveyor began asking around as he made his way past the groups of work servicemen: Did anyone know mathematics? Had anyone studied engineering? Was there a draftsman among them, an architect? At the noon meal they saw him studying lists of the work servicemen’s names and former occupations, looking for someone who could be of use.

One morning, as Andras and Mendel and the rest of their group worked to clear a mass of broken asphalt, the surveyor came shuffling up the road behind Major Kozma. When they reached Andras’s group, the major stopped and cocked a thumb at Andras.

“That’s the one,” he said. “Lévi, Andras. He doesn’t look like much, but apparently he’s had some training.”

The surveyor scrutinized his list. “You were a student of architecture,” he said.

Andras shrugged. It hardly seemed true anymore.

“How long did you study?”

“Two years. One course in engineering.”

“Well,” the surveyor said, and sighed. “That’ll do.”

Mendel, who had been listening, moved closer to Andras now; he fixed his eyes on the surveyor and said, “He doesn’t want the job.”

In an instant, Major Kozma’s hand had moved to the riding crop tucked into his belt. He turned to Mendel and squinted his good eye. “Did anyone speak to you, cockroach?”

For a moment Mendel hesitated, but then he continued as though the major were not to be feared. “The job is dangerous, sir. Lévi is a husband and a father. Take someone who’s got less to lose.”

The major’s scar flushed red. He pulled the crop from his belt and struck Mendel across the face. “Don’t tell me how to manage my company, cockroach,” he said. And then to Andras: “Present your work papers, Lévi.”

Andras did as he was told.

Kozma withdrew a grease pencil from his uniform pocket and made a notation on the papers, indicating that Andras was now under the surveyor’s immediate command. While he wrote, Andras extracted a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to Mendel, whose cheek showed a line of blood; Mendel pressed the handkerchief to his cheek. The surveyor watched them, seeming to understand the relationship between them. He cleared his throat and signaled to Kozma.

“Just a thought,” the surveyor said. “If you please, Major.”

“What is it now?”

“Why don’t you give me that one, too?” He cocked a thumb at Mendel. “He’s tall and strong. He can carry the equipment. And if there’s dangerous work to be done, I can make him do it. I wouldn’t want to lose another good assistant.”

Kozma pursed his ruined lips. “You want both of them?”

“It’s an idea, sir.”

“You’re a greedy little Jew, Szolomon.”

“The road has to be mapped. It’ll go faster with two of them.”

By that time, another officer had made his way over to their work group. This man was the general work foreman, a reserve colonel from the Royal Hungarian Corps of Engineers. He wanted to know the reason for the delay.

“Szolomon wants these two men to assist with the surveying.”

“Well, sign them up and send them off. We can’t have men standing around.”

And so Andras and Mendel became the surveyor’s new assistants, heirs to the position of the boy who had been killed.

By day they mapped the course of the road between Turka and Yavora, between Yavora and Novyi Kropyvnyk, between Novyi Kropyvnyk and Skhidnytsya. They learned the mysteries of the surveyor’s glass, the theodolite; the surveyor taught them how to mount it on the tripod and how to calibrate it with plumb and spirit level. He taught them how to orient it toward true north and how to line up the sight axis and the horizontal axis. He taught them to think of the landscape in the language of geometric forms: planes bisected by other planes lying at oblique or acute angles, all of it comprehensible, quantifiable, sane. The jagged hills were nothing more than complex polyhedrons, the Stryj a twisting half cylinder extending from the border of Lvivska Province to the deeper, longer trench of the Dniester. But they found it impossible to see only the geometry of the land; evidence of the war lay in plain view everywhere, demanding to be acknowledged. Farms had been burned, some of them by the Germans in their advance, others by the Russians in retreat. Untended crops had rotted in the fields. In the towns, Jewish businesses had been vandalized and looted and now stood empty. There was not a Jewish man or woman or child to be seen. The Poles were gone too. The Ukrainians who remained were opaque-eyed, as if the horrors they’d witnessed had led them to curtain their souls. Though the summer grasses still grew tall, and tart blackberries had come out on the shrubs along the roadside, the country itself seemed dead, an animal killed and gutted on the forest floor. Now the Germans were trying to stuff it full of new organs and make it crawl forward again. A new heart, new blood, a new liver, new entrails-and a new nerve center, Hitler’s headquarters at Vinnitsa. The road itself was a vein. Soldiers, forced laborers, ammunition, and supplies would run through it toward the front.

The surveyor was a clever man, and knew that his theodolite might be useful beyond its role in mapping the road. He had realized, not long into his sojourn in Ukraine, that it might work as a powerful tool of persuasion. When they came upon a prosperous-looking farmhouse or inn, he would set up the theodolite within view of the owners; someone would come out of the farmhouse or inn to ask what the surveyor was doing, and he would tell them that the road was to pass through their land, and possibly through their very house. Bargaining would follow: Could the surveyor be persuaded to move the road just a little to the east, just a little farther off? The surveyor could, for a modest price. In that manner he collected bread and cheese, fresh eggs, late summer fruit, old overcoats, blankets, candles. Andras and Mendel brought food and supplies home to the orphanage nearly every night and distributed them among the men.