Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Your K.

We have all decided to postpone. It was just as he had feared, only worse. Not just Klara, but Tibor and Ilana too. He would have done the same, of course-would never have left Ilana and Ádám alone in Budapest three days after Tibor had disappeared-but it was sad and infuriating nonetheless. In one stroke the Hungarian Army had grounded the entire Lévi clan. For the sake of an underground business in army boots and tinned meat, ammunition and jeep tires, they had all been tied to a continent intent upon erasing its Jews from the earth. That horrible truth lodged beneath his diaphragm and made it impossible for him to draw a full breath. He put his hand over the side of the bed and slipped the letter to József, who reacted with a low note of distress-József, who had long argued the foolishness of the trip to Palestine. Now, after three months in Ukraine, and after what they had just experienced and seen at the officers’ training school, József knew what it meant to feel one’s own vulnerability, to taste the salt of one’s own mortality. He understood what it meant for Klara and Tamás, Tibor and Ilana and Ádám, to be stranded in Hungary while the war drew closer on all sides. He must have known what his own deportation would have meant to his parents; beneath the well in Klara’s single line about them, he must have sensed the truth.

But at least he and Andras had this letter, this evidence that life continued at home. Andras could hear Klara’s voice reading the coded lines of the letter aloud; for a moment it was as though she were with him, curled small against him in his impossibly short bunk. Her skin hot beneath her close-wrapped dress. The warm black scent of her hair. Her mouth forming a string of spy words, dropping them into his ear like cool glass beads. We have decided to postpone our trip to the country. In another moment he would reply, would tell her all that had happened. Then the illusion vanished, and he was alone in his bunk again. He rolled over and stared into the cold muddy square of the courtyard, where the footprints of his comrades had long ago obscured the child-sized prints that had been there when they’d first arrived. In the moonlight he could make out the twin mounds of earth that were Mendel’s and Goldfarb’s graves, and beyond them the high brick wall, and above it the tops of the trees, and, farther still, a mesh of stars against the blue-black void of the sky.

THE DAY AFTER the air raid, work on the Turka-Skhidnytsya highway came to a temporary halt. All the Hungarian labor companies in the area were sent to the officers’ training school to repair the damage. The bombed buildings had to be rebuilt, the torn-up roads repaired. General Vilmos Nagy was still in residence; he couldn’t go on to Hitler’s headquarters in Vinnitsa until it could be determined that the way was safe. Major Kozma, energized by Nagy’s presence but not yet appraised of his unconventional political views, took the opportunity to arrange a work circus for his entertainment. The broken bricks and splintered timbers of the officers’ dining hall were supposed to be hauled away by horse cart, but there were more carts than there were horses to fill the traces; the stables, too, had suffered in the raid. So Kozma put his men into the traces instead. Eight forced laborers, Andras and József among them, were lashed in with leather harness straps and made to pull cartloads of detritus from the ruined mess hall to the assembly ground, which had become a salvage yard for building materials. The distance could not have been more than three hundred meters, but the cart was always loaded to overflowing. The men moved as if through a lake of hardening cement. When they fell to their knees in exhaustion, the guards climbed down from the driver’s bench and laid into them with whips. A group of officer trainees had stopped their own work to watch the spectacle. They booed when the men fell to their knees, and applauded when Andras and József and the others struggled to their feet again and dragged the cart a few meters farther toward the unloading area.

By midmorning the spectacle had generated enough talk to come to the attention of Nagy himself. Against the protests of his young adjutant he emerged from the bunker where he’d taken shelter and marched across the assembly ground to the ruin of the mess hall. With his thumbs hooked into his belt, he paused to watch the work servicemen toss debris into the bed of the cart and draw it forward. The general walked from cart bed to harness line, running his hand along the leather straps that connected the men to the traces. Kozma hustled across the mess-hall ruin and positioned himself close to the general. He pulled himself up to his full height and snapped a hand to his forehead.

The general didn’t return the salute. “Why are these men harnessed to the wagon?” he asked Kozma.

“They’re the best horses we’ve got,” Kozma said, and winked his good eye.

The general removed his glasses. He was a long time cleaning them with his handkerchief, and then he put them on and gave Kozma a cool stare. “Cut your men loose,” he said. “All of them.”

Kozma looked disappointed, but he raised a hand to signal one of the guards.

“Not him,” the general said. “You do it.”

The words sent a shock of energy through the line of harnessed men, a frisson Andras felt through the leather straps at his chest and shoulders.

“At once, Major,” Nagy said. “I don’t like to repeat an order.”

And Kozma had to go to each man and cut the leather straps with his pocketknife, which required him to get closer to them than he’d gotten since they had first come under his command-close enough to smell them, Andras thought, close enough to put himself in danger of catching their chronic cough, their body lice. The major’s hands trembled as he fumbled with the interlaced straps. It took him a quarter of an hour to free the eight of them. The officer-trainees who had stopped to watch had disappeared now.

“Have your guards bring a truckload of wheelbarrows from the supply warehouse,” the general ordered Kozma. To the men he said, “You will rest here until the wheelbarrows arrive. Then you will remove the debris by the barrow-load.” He watched as the work foremen broke the men into their groups as they waited for the carts. Kozma stood silent at the general’s side, twisting and twisting his hands as if he meant to shuck them of their skins. The general seemed to have forgotten that his life was in danger, that the NKVD was aware of his presence at the camp. He paid no attention to his adjutant’s urgent request that he return to the bunker. At lunchtime, Nagy and the adjutant escorted the men to the new mess tent and saw that they received an extra twenty decagrams of bread and ten grams of margarine. The general had his adjutant drag a bench over to the patch of bare earth where the work servicemen were eating; he took his lunch with them, asking questions about their lives before the war and what they planned to do when it was over. The men responded tentatively at first, uncertain whether or not to trust this exalted person in his decorated jacket, but before long they began to speak more freely. Andras didn’t speak; he hovered at the edge of the group, aware that he was witnessing something extraordinary.

After lunch, the general ordered that the men of the 79/6th be deloused and bathed and given clean uniforms from the storehouses of the officers’ training school. They were to be examined by the medics at the school infirmary, their wounds and illnesses treated. Then they were to be reassigned to jobs that would allow them to recover their health. It was clear that they were too weak and sick to perform hard labor. For the rest of the day he sent them to work in the damp heat of the mess tent, where the cook set them to peeling potatoes and cutting onions for the officers’ dinner.