Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Klara’s next missive brought the news that Tibor had been called back to the Munkaszolgálat and sent to the Eastern Front. Ilana and Ádám had come to live on Nefelejcs utca along with everyone else. Now the seven of them were getting by on the money that had been intended for the trip to Palestine, which Klara’s lawyer forwarded in small increments each month. Andras tried to imagine it: the bright rooms of the apartment filled with all the things the Hász family had brought from Andrássy út, the remaining rugs and armoires and bric-a-brac of their princely estate; Elza Hász, a mourning dove in a morning dress, her wings folded at her sides; Klara and Ilana trying to keep the babies clean and calm and fed in the midst of a crowd; Klara’s mother stoic and silent in her corner; the constant smell of potatoes and paprika; the flat blond light of Budapest in winter, falling indifferently through the tall windows. Absent from the letter was any mention of Mátyás, of whom Andras thought constantly as blizzards abraded the hills and fields of Ukraine.

In mid-December a note came from József’s mother: György had been admitted to the hospital with a burning pain in his chest and a high fever. The diagnosis was an infection of the pericardium, the membrane that surrounded the heart. His doctor wanted him to be treated with colchicine, pericardiocentesis, and three weeks of rest on a cardiac ward. The cost of this medical disaster, nearly five thousand pengő, threatened to unhouse them all; Klara was trying to arrange to have her lawyer send the money.

József was downcast and silent all day after he’d received the letter. That night at the orphanage he didn’t get into bed at the ordinary hour. Instead he stood at the window and stared down into the snowy depths of the courtyard, a coarse blanket wrapped around him like a dressing gown.

Andras rolled over on his bunk and propped himself up on an elbow. “What is it?” he said. “Your father?”

József gave a nod. “He hates to be sick,” he said. “Hates to be a burden to anyone. He’s miserable if he has to miss a day of work.” He pulled the blanket closer and looked down into the courtyard. “Meanwhile I’ve done nothing at all with my life. Nothing of use to anyone, certainly not my parents. Never had a job. Never even been in love, or been loved by anyone. Not by any of those girls in Paris. No one in Budapest, either. Not even Zsófia, who was pregnant with my child.”

“Zsófia’s pregnant?” Andras said.

“Not anymore. Last spring. She got rid of it somehow. She didn’t want it any more than I did, that was how little she cared for me.” He released a long breath. “I can’t imagine you’d have any sympathy for me, Andras. But it’s a hard thing to have to see oneself clearly all of a sudden. You must understand what I mean.”

Andras said he believed he did.

“I know you don’t think much of my paintings,” József said. “I could see it when you came by last year, the time you and Klara brought the baby to my flat.”

“On the contrary, I thought the new work was good. I told Klara as much.”

“What if I were to try to contact my art dealer in Budapest?” József said, turning to Andras. “Have him sell something? I never considered the new pieces to be finished, but a collector might think otherwise. I might ask Papp to see what he can get for those nine big pieces.”

“You’d sell your unfinished work?”

“I can’t imagine what else I can do,” József said, turning from the window. For a moment the curve of his forehead and the dark wing of his hair were like Klara’s, and Andras experienced an unwelcome jolt of affection for him. He lay back in bed and stared at the dark plane of the ceiling.

“The pieces I saw were good,” he told József. “They didn’t seem unfinished. They might fetch a high price. But it might not be necessary to sell them. Klara may be able to get the money sent from Vienna.”

“And what if she can?” József said. “Do you think they won’t need more money for something else next month? What if one of the children gets sick, or my grandmother? What if it’s something that can’t wait for Klara to contact her lawyer?” The question hovered in the air for a long moment while they both considered that frightening possibility.

“What can I tell you?” Andras said. “I think it’s a fine idea. If I had work to sell right now, I’d sell it.”

“Give me your pen,” József said. “I’ll write my mother. Then I’ll write to Papp.”

Andras felt around in his knapsack for his pen and the last precious bottle of India ink left over from their set-design supplies. Using the windowsill as a desk and the moonlight as a lamp, József began to write. But a moment later he spoke again into the dark.

“I’ve never given my father a single thing,” he said. “Not one thing.”

“He’ll know what it means for you to sell those paintings.”

“What if he dies before my mother gets this letter?”

“Then at least your mother will know what you meant to do,” Andras said. “And Klara will know too.”

The next morning they woke and cleared snow, and the day after that they cleared snow, and the following day they encountered Captain Erdő as he was marching his trainees along the road, and József managed to slip the letters into his hand. Every day after that they cleared snow and cleared snow, until, on the twentieth of December, Major Bálint announced that they were to pack their things and clean the orphanage from top to bottom; their unit was to move east the following day.

As much as they hated the orphanage, as much as every man had loathed his too-short bunk and cursed when he had to stoop to the child-sized sinks in the chill of a winter morning, as much as they had lived in terrified awareness of the killings that had taken place on the grounds, the murder of the children that had preceded their arrival, and the execution of Mendel Horovitz and László Goldfarb, as much as they had yearned to leave those rooms where they had been starved, beaten, and humiliated, they felt a strange resistance to the thought of turning the place over to another company, a group of unknown men. The 79/6th had become the caretakers of the graves of all their dead, the mounds marked with stones carried from the roadbed. They had kept the ground swept, the stones clean; they had placed smaller stones upon the larger ones in tribute to the men who had been shot or died of illness or overwork. They had become the caretakers, too, of the ghosts of the Jewish orphans of Turka; the 79/6th were the only ones who had seen those undersized footprints left behind in the hallways and the courtyard. They had eaten at the children’s abandoned tables, memorized the shapes of the Cyrillic letters scratched into the tops of the schoolroom desks, been bitten at night by the same bedbugs that had bitten the children, stubbed their toes on the bed frames where the children had stubbed their toes. Now they would have to abandon them, too, those children who had already been abandoned three times: once by their own parents, once by the state, and finally by life itself. But the men of the 79/6th-those who survived the winter-would say Kaddish for the Jewish orphans of Turka every August for as long as they lived.

They moved east, on foot, in the direction of danger. The land all around looked just as it did in Turka: snow-laden hills, heavy pines, the papery remains of cornstalks stubbling the white fields, stands of cows chuffing cumuli into the freezing air. The towns were nothing more than scatterings of farmhouses in the shadowy folds of the hills. The wind came through the men’s overcoats and settled into their bones. They had to quarter in stables with the workhorses or sleep on the floors of the peasants’ houses, where they lay open-eyed all night in fear of the peasants, who lay open-eyed all night in fear of them. At times there was no stable or village at all, and they had to bivouac in the freezing cold under the aurora-lit sky. The temperature dropped at night to -20°C. The men always had a fire, but the fire itself was dangerous; it could mesmerize you, it could cause you to stop moving, it could distract you from the difficult work of staying alive. If you fell asleep beside it during the night watch, tricked by its warmth into letting your blanket drop from your shoulders, it might burn itself to ash and leave you exposed to the cold. One morning Andras found the Ivory Tower that way, his arms around his knees, his large head bent forward in what appeared to be sleep. In front of him was the dead black ring where the fire had burned out in the snow, and on his shoulders lay a dusting of ice and frost. Andras put a hand to the Ivory Tower’s neck, but the skin was as cold and unyielding as the ground itself. They had to carry his body with them for three days before they came across a patch of earth soft enough to receive him. It was beside a stable, where the horses’ warmth had kept the ground from being frozen solid. They buried the Ivory Tower in the middle of the night and scratched his name and the date of his death into the side of the barn. They said the Ninety-first Psalm again. By that time they could all recite it from memory.