Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“But what happened to him?” Andras asked, his hands on his knees, looking into the hollowed-out eyes of the managing editor. “Did he die at Voronezh?”

“That’s the pity of it,” the editor said. “He never did die, though he kept trying. He volunteered to clear land mines. Ran into the line of fire every chance he got. Survived it all. Even the consumption couldn’t kill him.”

“How did you leave him? Where did you last see him?”

“He’s there in the corner, where your friend is sitting now.”

Andras looked over his shoulder. József had knelt to give water to a man who lay propped on a pile of folded grain sacks; the man turned his head away, and through the veil of illness and emaciation Andras recognized Zoltán Novak.

“I know him,” Andras told the editor.

“Of course. Who didn’t? He was well known.”

“Personally, I mean.”

“Go pay your regards, then.” He put a hand to Andras’s chest and gave him a push in the man’s direction, the gesture like a dim ghost of his old energy, his old vehemence.

Andras approached József and the man supported on the grain sacks. He caught József’s eye and beckoned him into a corner.

“That’s Zoltán Novak,” Andras whispered.

József wrinkled his forehead and glanced back toward the man. “Novak?” he said. “Are you certain?”

Andras nodded.

“God help us,” József said. “He’s nearly dead.”

But the man raised his head from the grain sacks and looked at Andras and József.

“I’ll be right back,” József said.

“Give me water,” said Novak, his voice a raw whisper in his throat.

“I’ll go to him,” Andras said.

“Why?”

“He knows me.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’ll be a comfort,” József said.

But Andras went to kneel on the floor beside Novak, who raised himself an inch or two on the folded sacks, his eyes closed, his breath rattling like the stroked edge of a comb.

“Give me water, there,” he said again.

Andras raised his canteen and Novak drank. When he was done, he cleared his throat and looked at Andras. A slow heat came to his expression, a faint flushing of the skin around the eyelids. He pushed himself up onto his elbows.

“Lévi,” he said, and shook his head. He made three burrs of noise that might have been consternation or laughter. The exertion seemed to have drained him. He lay back again and closed his eyes. It was a long time before he spoke again, and when he did, the words came slowly and with effort. “Lévi,” he said. “I must have died, thank God. I’ve died and gone down to Gehenna. And here you are with me, also dead, I hope.”

“No,” Andras said. “Still alive and here in Ukraine, both of us.”

Novak opened his eyes again. There was a softness in his gaze, a complicated pity that did not exclude himself but was not focused upon himself alone; it seemed to take in all of them, Andras and József and the editor and the other sick and dying men and the laborers who were bringing them water and tending their wounds.

“You see how it stands with me,” Novak said. “Maybe it gives you some satisfaction to see me like this.”

“Of course not, Novak-úr. Tell me what I can do for you.”

“There’s only one thing I want,” Novak said. “But I can’t ask for it without making a murderer of you.” He gave a half smile, pausing again to catch his breath. Then he coughed painfully and turned onto his side. “I’ve wished to die for months. But I’m quite strong, as it turns out. Isn’t that a lovely thing? And I’m too much of a coward to take my own life.”

“Are you hungry?” Andras asked. “I’ve got some bread in my knapsack.”

“Do you think I want bread?”

Andras glanced away.

“That other man’s her nephew, isn’t he,” Novak said. “He resembles her.”

“I’d like to think she’s a good deal better looking than that,” Andras said.

Novak coughed out a laugh. “You’re right, there,” he said, and then shook his head. “Andras Lévi. I hoped I wouldn’t see you again after that day at the Opera.”

“I’ll go away if you want.”

Novak shook his head again, and Andras waited for him to say something more. But he had exhausted himself with speaking; he fell into a shallow open-mouthed sleep. Andras sat with him as he struggled for breath. Outside, the wind was shrill with the force of the blizzard. Andras put his head on his arm and fell asleep, and when he woke it had grown dark inside the granary. No one had a candle; those who still had flashlights hadn’t had batteries for months. The sound and smell of sick men closed in around him like a close-woven veil. Novak was wide awake now and looking intently at him, his breathing more labored than before. Each intake of breath sounded as though he were building a complicated structure from inappropriate materials with broken tools; each exhalation was the defeated collapse of that ugly and imbalanced structure. He spoke again, so quietly that Andras had to lean close to hear.

“It’s all right now,” he was saying. “Everything’s all right.”

It was unclear whether he meant to reassure Andras or himself or both of them at once; he seemed almost to be addressing someone who wasn’t present, though his eyes were fixed on Andras in the darkness. Soon he went quiet and fell asleep again. Andras stayed beside him all night as he wandered in and out of sleep, and the next day he gave Novak his ration of bread. Novak couldn’t eat it dry, but Andras mashed it into crumbs and mixed it with melted snow. They spent three days that way, Novak drifting awake and sleeping, Andras giving him small measures of food and water, until the weather had cleared and the snow had melted enough for the 79/6th to go on again toward the border. When Bálint announced that the men would move out the following morning, Andras’s relief was cut with dismay. He begged a moment’s conference with the major; they couldn’t leave the other men there to die.

“How do you propose to move them, Serviceman?” Bálint asked, his tone stern, though not unkind. “We don’t have ambulances. We don’t have materials for litters. And we can’t possibly stay here.”

“We can improvise something, sir.”

Bálint shook his shaggy head. “These men are better off inside. The medical corps will be along in a few days. Those who can be moved will be moved then.”

“Some of them will be dead by then,” Andras said.

“In that case, Lévi, dragging them into the cold and snow won’t save them.”

“One of those men saved my life when I was a student in Paris. I can’t abandon him.”

“Listen to me,” Bálint said, his large earth-colored eyes steady on Andras’s. “I have a son and daughter at home. The others are husbands and fathers, too, many of them. We’re young men. We’ve got to get home alive. That’s the principle by which I’ve commanded this company since we turned back. We’re still a hundred kilometers from the border, five days’ walk at least. If we carry sick men with us we’ll slow the entire company. We could lose our lives.”

“Let me stay, then, sir.”

“That’s not in my orders.”

“Let me.”

“No!” Bálint said, angry now. “I’ll march you out at gunpoint if I have to.”

But in the end there was no need for a show of force. Zoltán Novak, former husband and father, former director of the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt and the Budapest Operaház, the man Klara Morgenstern had loved for eleven years and in some measure must have loved still, fell asleep that night and did not wake again.

BY THE TIME his train reached Budapest, the forsythia had come into bloom. All else was gray or vaguely yellow-green; a few of the trees along the outer ring road showed the swelling of buds, though the city retained the wet rawness of recent snowmelt. 1943 still felt unreal to him. He had lost his sense of time entirely through the last phase of the journey home. But he knew today’s date: It was the twenty-fifth of March, seven months and three weeks since he’d been sent to Ukraine. Klara had come to meet his train at Keleti Station. He’d nearly gone faint at the sight of her on the platform with a child standing beside her-standing! His son, Tamás, in a knee-length coat and sturdy little boy’s shoes. Tamás, almost a year and a half old now; Tamás who had been a baby in Klara’s arms the last time Andras had seen him. Klara’s brow showed a narrow pleat of worry, but she was otherwise unchanged; her dark hair was caught in its loose knot at her nape, the beloved planes of her clavicles exposed by the neckline of her gray dress. She made no attempt to hide her dismay at Andras’s physical state. She put a hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled. He knew what he looked like, knew he looked like a man who’d been threshed almost free of his body. His head had been shaved for delousing; his clothes, or what was left of them, hung loosely on his frame. His hands were crabbed and bent, his cheek scarred with three white rays where the glass from a shot-out barn window had cut him. When Klara took him into her arms he felt how careful she was with him, as though she might hurt him with an embrace. József was not there to witness their reunion; he was still in Debrecen, recovering at a military hospital. His knee had been wounded during the border crossing, and he was receiving treatment for an infection of the soft tissues. He would return in another week or two. From a post office near the hospital, Andras had been able to wire Klara the news of his own return.