Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Darling. Darling. They would have stood there saying it to each other all night, looking at each other and kissing each other’s hands, touching each other’s faces, had not Tamás made his protest and begged to be picked up. Andras held him and looked into the round face with its inquisitive eyebrows and its large expressive eyes.

“Apa,” Klara instructed the boy, and pointed to Andras’s chest. But Tamás turned and put his arms out to Klara, afraid of this unfamiliar man.

Andras bent to his knapsack and opened the flap. Inside he found the red India-rubber ball he’d bought for three fillér from a street vendor in Debrecen. The ball had a white star at each of its poles and was bisected by a band of green paint. Tamás put out his hands for it. But Andras tossed it high into the air and caught it on his back, between his shoulder blades. He’d learned the trick from one of his schoolmates in Konyár. Now he plucked the ball from his back and bowed to Tamás, who opened his mouth and crowed with laughter.

“More,” Tamás said.

It was the first word Andras had heard him speak. The trick proved equally funny a second and third time. At last Andras gave Tamás the ball, and he held it raptly as Klara carried him through the Erzsébetváros toward home. Andras walked beside them with his hand at Klara’s waist. No longer with him was the feeling he’d had when he’d returned home from the Munkaszolgálat before: that the continuation of ordinary life in Budapest was impossible after what he’d come from, that his mental and physical torment must necessarily have changed the rest of the world. There was a certain numbness where he had once experienced incredulity. It almost frightened him, that stillness. It was inarguable evidence of his having grown older.

As they walked, Klara told him the news of the family: how the money from the sale of József’s paintings had allowed György to regain his health in the hospital; how Klara’s mother, who’d had pneumonia over the winter, was now hale enough to go to the market every morning for the day’s vegetables and bread; how Ilana had mastered Hungarian and had proved to be a genius at economizing on their rations; how Elza Hász, who before that past December had never even known how to boil an egg, had learned to make potato paprikás and chicken soup. There had even been news from Elisabet: She’d had another child, a girl. She was still living on the family estate in Connecticut while Paul served in the navy, but they planned to move to a larger apartment in New York when he returned. Of the possibility of emigrating to the States there had been no word. Other possibilities of escape had evaporated. Klein, Klara revealed in a whisper as they paused at a street corner, had been arrested for arranging illegal emigrations. He’d been in jail since the previous November, awaiting trial. She had gone a few times to visit his grandparents, who demonstrated no sign of need. They persisted with their little flock of goats in the ancient cottage in Frangepán köz; perhaps the authorities considered them too old to be worth pursuing. The names of Klein’s clients-former, current, and would-be emigrants-were concealed in his labyrinth of codes, but there was no telling how long it might be before the police found their way through the maze.

“And your parents?” she asked. “Are they well?”

“They’re fine,” Andras said. “Still sick with worry about Mátyás, though. They haven’t had a word of news. They weren’t pleased to see me looking like this, either. I didn’t tell them the half of what happened.”

“Tibor’s anxious to see you,” she said. “Ilana had to resort to threats to keep him from coming to the station. But his doctor says he’s got to rest.”

“How is he? How does he look?”

Klara sighed. “Thin and exhausted. Quiet. Sometimes he seems to see terrible things in the air between himself and us. Every minute since he’s been back he’s had Ádám in his arms. The boy is so attached to him now, Ilana can hardly feed him.”

“And you?” He put a hand to her hair, her cheek. “Klárika.”

She raised her chin to him and kissed him, there on the street with their child in her arms.

“Your letters,” she said. “If I hadn’t had them, I don’t know.”

“They can’t always have been a comfort.”

Tears came to her eyes again. “I wanted to think I’d miunderstood about Mendel. I read and reread that letter, hoping I was wrong. But it’s true, isn’t it.”

“Yes, darling, it’s true.”

“Sometime soon you’ll tell me everything,” she said, and took his hand.

They walked on together until they reached the door of the apartment building. He looked up toward the window he knew to belong to their bedroom; she’d installed a window box full of early crocuses.

“There’s one more piece of news,” she said, so gravely that at first he was certain it was news of a death. “There’s someone else staying with us now. Someone who traveled a long way to get here.”

“Who?”

“Come upstairs,” she said. “You’ll see.”

He followed her into the courtyard, his heartbeat quickening. He wasn’t certain he could face a surprise guest. He wanted to sit down on the edge of the fountain at the center of the courtyard, stay there and gather himself for a few days. As they climbed the open stairway he could see the flicker of goldfish in the fountain’s green depths.

They were at the door, and the door opened. There was Tibor, drawn and pale, his eyes full of tears behind his silver-framed glasses. He put his arms around his brother and they held each other in the hallway. Andras inhaled Tibor’s faint smell of soap and sebum and clean cotton, not wanting to move or speak. But Tibor led him into the sitting room, where the family was waiting. There was his nephew, Ádám, standing beside his mother; Ilana, her hair covered beneath an embroidered kerchief; György Hász, grayer and older; Elza Hász austere in a cotton work dress; Klara’s mother, smaller than ever, her eyes deep and bright. And beyond them, rising from the couch, a pale oval-faced man in a dark jersey that had belonged to Andras, a crumpled handkerchief in his hand.

Andras experienced a tilt of vertigo. He put a hand on the back of the sofa as the feeling passed through him like a pressure wave.

Eli Polaner.

“Not possible,” Andras said. He looked from Klara to his brother to Ilana, and then again at Polaner himself. “Is it true?” he asked in French.

“True,” Polaner said, in his familiar and long-lost voice.

It was a nightmare version of a fairy tale, a story grim enough to teach Andras new horrors after what he’d seen in Ukraine. He wished almost that he’d never had to know what had happened to Polaner at the concentration camp in Compiègne where he’d been sent after his removal from the Foreign Legion in 1940-how he’d been beaten and starved and deported half dead to Buchenwald, where he’d spent two years in forced labor and sexual slavery, his arm tattooed with his number, his chest bearing an inverted pink triangle superimposed over an upright yellow one. Polaner’s homosexuality had remained a secret until one of his workmates had given up a list of names in exchange for a position as a kapo; afterward, Polaner had found himself at the lowest level of the camp hierarchy, marked with a symbol that made him a target for the guards and kept the other prisoners from getting too close to him. He’d been assigned to the stone quarry, where he hauled bags of crushed rock for fourteen hours a day. When his shift at the quarry was finished, he had to clean the latrines of his barracks block-a reminder, the block sergeant told him, that at this camp he was lower than shit, a servant to shit. Sometimes, late at night, he and a few of the others would be led to a back door of the officers’ quarters, where they would be tied and raped, first by one of the officers and then by his secretaries and his orderly.