Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

At dinnertime the men received another supplemental ration: twenty decagrams of bread again, and ten more grams of margarine. An unfamiliar officer, a tall ursine man who introduced himself to them as Major Bálint, announced that the supplement was to be permanent; the general had ordered that the men’s diet be altered. For the time being they would continue to serve in the mess tent rather than return to their work on the road. And there was to be another change: Bálint himself would be their new commander. Major Kozma would no longer have anything to do with the 79/6th, nor, if General Nagy had anything to say about it, with any other Munkaszolgálat company, except perhaps the one in which he would be forced to serve.

Not once since their arrival at Turka had there been a night at the orphanage that might have been called festive. Even when they’d observed the High Holidays they had done so with a sense of mournful duty, and an awareness of how far they were from everything and everyone they loved. That night at the barracks, at an hour when Kozma might ordinarily have lined them up outside and made them stand at attention until they fell to their knees, the men gathered in one of the downstairs classrooms to play cards and sing nonsense songs and read the news aloud from scraps of newspaper gleaned from the officers’ training school. The Soviets, the Ivory Tower read, continued to hold off the Nazi offensive at Stalingrad as the battle entered its eleventh week; bitter fighting continued on the streets of the city and in the northern suburbs, raising speculation that the Nazis might find themselves still entrenched in that fight when the Russian winter arrived. “Let them freeze!” the Ivory Tower cried, and crowned himself with a nautical hat Andras had folded from a page of advertisements. He grabbed Andras by the arms and made him dance a peasant dance. “We’re free, my darlings, free,” he sang, whirling him around the room. It wasn’t true, of course; Lukás and the other guards still kept watch at the door, and any member of the 79/6th could have been shot for walking down the road unaccompanied. But they had indeed been freed from Major Kozma. And as if that weren’t enough, they were clean and free of lice. General Nagy had gone so far as to order that their mattresses and blankets be dragged outside, burned, and replaced immediately with new bedding.

That night, from the fragrant comfort of a mattress stuffed with sweet hay, Andras wrote to Klara. Dear K, There has been a surprising turn of events. Our circumstances in T. have changed for the better. We are well, and have just received new uniforms and a good work assignment. You must not worry on our account. If an opportunity arises for you to go to the country again, you must go. I’ll follow as soon as I can. Unfortunately, I must confirm what you seem to have guessed about M.H. Please send love to my brother and Ilana. Kiss Tamás for me. As ever, your devoted A.

The next day, as he served lunch to the officer-trainees and their superiors, he waited impatiently for Erdő to come through the serving line. When Erdő came at last-grim-faced and devoid of his monocle, still mourning the loss of The Tatars in Hungary amid the camp’s other losses-Andras passed the letter to him underneath his tin plate. Without a sign or a wink or any other acknowledgment, Erdő moved down the serving line; Andras saw a flash of white as he transferred the note from his hand to his trouser pocket. As long as the mail kept moving between Ukraine and Hungary, Klara would know that Andras was well and that he wanted her to go to Palestine if she could.

General Nagy’s plan for the rehabilitation of the 79/6th continued through the middle of November. The sick men were treated at the infirmary, and those who could still work gained weight on the extra rations. It helped that they had been assigned to kitchen duty. Though the cooks kept the food supply under careful watch, it was often possible to glean a stray carrot or potato or an extra measure of soup. If Andras missed his long walks to the end of the road with the surveyor, he had the pleasure of Szolomon’s weekly visits to the officers’ training school. The surveyor brought news of the war, and, when he could, slipped Andras and József some Ukrainian delicacy or a piece of warm clothing. One chilly afternoon Andras watched József tear open a paper-wrapped package of the rolled dumplings called holushky-little ears-and felt he was watching his own ravenous self in Paris, unwrapping a poppyseed roll sent by the elder Mrs. Hász. What were they now, he and József, but a pair of hungry men on the ragged edge of a country at war, at the mercy of forces beyond their control? All the barriers between them, or at least all the markers of class that had seemed to separate them when they had lived in Paris, were arbitrary to the point of absurdity now. When József offered him the package of holushky, he took it and said köszönöm. József sent him a look of surprised relief, a reaction that confused Andras until it occurred to him that this was the first time he’d spoken a kind word to József since Mendel’s death. Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you involuntarily to forgive a person who didn’t deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn’t hate. It must have been the amnesiac effect of extremity, he thought, that bitter potion they ingested every day in Ukraine with their ration of soup and sandy bread.

One morning later that week, the men woke to find the courtyard of the orphanage blurred in a gray-white nimbus of snow. The clouds seemed intent upon giving up their contents all at once, the flakes speeding to earth in acorn-sized clusters. Here was the winter they’d dreaded, making its unambiguous entrance; the temperature had dropped twenty degrees overnight. At lineup, snow swarmed into their ears and mouths and noses. It found its way into the crevices between their overcoats and neck wraps, worked itself in through the grommets of their boots. Major Bálint took his place at the front of the assembly yard and announced with regret that the men had been removed from their duties at the officers’ training school and assigned to snow removal. The guards unlocked the shed and handed the men their tools-the same pointed spades they’d used for road-building, not the curved rectangular blades that would have suited the job-and marched them out toward the village to begin their winter work.

That afternoon, when Szolomon found Andras and József among the snow-removal teams, he delivered the news that he’d been posted to a mapping office in Voronezh, and would depart on a military train that afternoon. He wished them a safe passage through the winter, said a blessing over their heads, and stuffed their pockets with long-unseen varieties of food-tins of meat and sardines, jars of pickled herring, bags of walnuts, dense rye biscuits. Then, without a word of goodbye, their reticent patron and protector hurried down the road and disappeared behind a veil of snow.

All week the temperature fell and fell, far below zero. Andras’s back burned with the work; his hands wept with new blisters. Nothing he had done in the Munkaszolgálat was as hard as clearing that snow, day after day, as the cold deepened. But it was impossible to give up hope when there was always a chance that a letter might arrive from Budapest. Every time they went to clear snow from the roads at the officers’ training school, Andras and József looked for Captain Erdő; whenever he had mail for them he found a way to slip it into their pockets. At the beginning of December a letter came from György Hász: The family fortunes had dwindled further still, and György, Elza, and the elder Mrs. Hász had been obliged to abandon the high-ceilinged flat on Andrássy út and move in with Klara. But they must not worry. K was safe. Everyone was fine. They must concern themselves only with their own survival.