Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

The surveyor also had valuable connections, among them a friend at the Royal Hungarian Officers’ Training School in Turka-an officer there who had once been a well-known actor back in Szeged. This man, Pál Erdő, had been charged with staging a production of Károly Kisfaludy’s famous martial drama, The Tatars in Hungary. When he and the surveyor met in town, Erdő complained of the difficulty and the absurdity of producing a play in the midst of preparing young men to go to war. The surveyor began lobbying him to use the play as an excuse to do some good-to request, for example, the help of the labor servicemen, who might benefit from spending a few of their evening hours in the relative calm and safety of the school’s assembly hall. In particular he mentioned Andras’s background in set design and Mendel’s literary ability. Captain Erdő, an old-guard liberal, was eager to do what he could to ease the labor servicemen’s situation; in addition to Andras and Mendel he requested the aid of six others from the 79/6th, among them József Hász, with his talent for painting, as well as a tailor, a carpenter, and an electrician. Three evenings a week this group marched directly from the work site to the officers’ training school, where they assisted in the staging of a smaller military drama within the larger one. For payment they received an extra measure of soup from the kitchen of the officers’ training school.

On the days when the surveyor didn’t need them-days when he had to sit in an office and make calculations, correct topographical maps, and write his reports-Andras and Mendel worked with the others on the road. Those days, Kozma made them pay for their time with the surveyor and their evenings at the officers’ training school. Without fail he gave them the hardest work. If the work required tools, he took the tools away and made them do it with their rag-wrapped hands. When their work group had to transport wooden pilings to shore up the embankments on either side of the road, he made a guard sit in the middle of Andras’s and Mendel’s pilings while they carried them. When they had to cart barrowfuls of sand, he removed the wheels from their wheelbarrows and made them drag the carts through the mud. They paid the price without a word. They knew that their position with the surveyor and their work at the officers’ training school might keep them alive once the cold weather set in.

There was no discussion between Andras and Mendel of writing a newspaper for the 79/6th, of course; even if they’d had the time, there was no way to convince themselves that it would be safe. Only once did the subject of The Crooked Rail come up again between them. It was on a rainy Tuesday in early September, when they were out with the surveyor at the far end of the road, mapping a course toward a bridge that had to be rebuilt. Szolomon had left them in an abandoned dairy barn while he went to speak to a farmer whose pigsties were situated too close to the roadbed-to-be. Outside the barn, a steady drizzle fell. Inside, Andras and Mendel sat on overturned milk pails and ate the brown bread and soft-curd cheese the surveyor had gleaned for them that morning.

“Not bad for a Munkaszolgálat lunch,” Mendel said.

“We’ve had worse.”

“It’s no milk and honey, though.” Mendel’s usual wry expression had fallen away. “I think about it every day,” he said. “You might have been in Palestine by now. Instead, thanks to me, we’re touring beautiful rural Ukraine.” Their old joke from The Snow Goose.

“Thanks to you?” Andras said. “That’s ridiculous, you know.”

“Not really,” Mendel said, his moth-antenna eyebrows drawing close together. “The Snow Goose was my doing. So was The Biting Fly. The Crooked Rail came naturally, of course. I was the one who wrote the first piece. And I was the one who suggested we use the paper to get the men angry and make them slow down the operation.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“I keep thinking about it, Andras. Maybe Varsádi’s operation fell under suspicion because we were making the trains run late. Maybe we slowed things down just enough to raise a red flag.”

“If the trains ran late, it’s because the men in charge of the operation were too greedy to send them out on time. You can’t take the blame for that.”

“You can’t ignore the connection,” Mendel said.

“It’s not your fault we’re here. There’s a war on, in case you haven’t heard.”

“I can’t help thinking we might have pushed things over the edge. It’s been keeping me up at night, to tell you the truth. I can’t help but feel like we’re the ones to blame.”

The same thought had occurred to him, on the train and many times since. But when he heard Mendel speak the words aloud, they seemed to reflect a novel kind of desperation, a brand of desire Andras had never considered before. Here was Mendel Horovitz insisting, even at the price of terrible burning guilt, that he’d had some control over his own fate and Andras’s, some agency in the events that had swept them up and deposited them on the Eastern Front. Of course, Andras thought. Of course. Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?

Every Munkaszolgálat commander, as Andras had learned by now, possessed his own special array of neuroses, his own set of axes to grind. One way to survive in a labor camp was to determine what might elicit the commander’s anger and to shape one’s own behavior to avoid it. But Kozma’s triggers were delicate and mysterious, his moods volatile, the roots of his neuroses hidden in darkness. What made him so cruel to Lieutenant Horvath? What made him kick his gray wolfhound? Where and how had he gotten the scar that bisected his face? No one knew, not even the guards. Kozma’s anger, once evoked, could not be turned aside. Nor was it reserved for men like Andras and Mendel who received special privileges. Any form of weakness drew his attention. A man who showed signs of fatigue might be beaten, or tortured: made to stand at attention with full buckets of water in his outstretched arms, or perform calisthenics after the workday was finished, or sleep outside in the rain. By mid-September the men began to die, despite the still-mild weather and the attentions of Tolnay, the company medic. One of the older men contracted a lung infection that devolved into fatal pneumonia; another succumbed to heart failure at work. Bouts of dysentery came and went, sometimes taking a man with them. Injuries often went untreated; even a shallow cut might lead to blood poisoning or result in the loss of a limb. Tolnay made frequent and alarming reports to Kozma, but a man had to be near death before Kozma would send him to the Munkaszolgálat infirmary in the village.

Nights at the orphanage held unpredictable terrors. At two o’clock in the morning Kozma might wake all the men and command them to stand at attention until dawn; the guards would beat them if they fell asleep or dropped to their knees. Other nights, when Kozma and Horvath drank with their fellow officers in their quarters, four of the labor servicemen might be called to come before them and play a horrible game: two of the men would have to sit on the others’ shoulders and try to wrestle each other to the ground. Kozma would beat them with his riding crop if the fighting wasn’t fierce enough. The game ended only when one of the men had been knocked unconscious.

But Kozma’s cruelest form of torture, and the one he exercised most frequently, was the withholding of rations. He seemed to love knowing that his men were hungry, that he alone controlled their food supply; he seemed to enjoy the fact that they were at his mercy and desperate to have what he alone could give them. If it hadn’t been for the extra food Andras and Mendel brought back secretly from their surveying trips, the 79/6th might have starved outright. As it was, the younger men among them were always ravenous. Even the full ration wouldn’t have been enough to replace the energy they lost at work. They didn’t understand how the other labor companies in Turka could have withstood the hunger for months on end; what was keeping them alive? They began to ask, up and down the lines of servicemen who worked along the road, what one did to keep from starving. Soon the news came back that there was a thriving black market in the village, and that all kinds of provisions were available if the men had something to trade. It seemed a bitter irony that a company of men who’d been sent away because of their officers’ black-market dealings would now be forced to buy from the black market themselves, but the fact was that no other alternative existed.