Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

All that spring they waited for news of Mátyás. When they celebrated Passover, Andras’s mother insisted upon setting a place for him; when they opened the door to welcome Elijah, they were calling him home too. In the time since Andras had been sent to Ukraine, his mother and father seemed to have grown old. His father’s hair had gone from gray to white. His mother’s back had acquired a curve. She curled into the tent of her cardigan like a dry grass stem. Even the sight of Tamás and Ádám failed to cheer her; it wasn’t her grandchildren she longed for, but her lost boy.

Polaner, who knew what it meant to wait for news, kept his own mourning private. He never spoke of his parents or his sisters, as though a mention of his loss might bring on the tragedy that Andras’s family dreaded. He insisted upon going alone to the Dohány Synagogue every afternoon to recite Kaddish. Tradition required him to do it for a year. But as the news continued to drift in from Poland, it began to seem as though no one could be exempt from mourning, as though no period of mourning would ever be long enough. In April, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had mounted an armed stand against the deportation of the ghetto’s last sixty thousand residents; no one had expected it to last more than a few days, but the ghetto fighters held out for four weeks. The Pesti Napló printed photographs of women throwing Molotov cocktails at German tanks, of Waffen-SS troops and Polish policemen setting buildings afire. The battle lasted until the middle of May, and ended, as everyone had known it would, with the clearing of the ghetto: a massacre of the Jewish fighters, and the deportation of those who had survived. The next day, the Pesti Napló reported that one and a half million Polish Jews had been killed in the war, according to the exiled Polish government’s estimate. Andras, who had translated every article and radio program about the uprising for Polaner, couldn’t bring himself to translate that number, to deliver that staggering statistic to a friend already in mourning. One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that? Andras knew it took three thousand to fill the seats of the Dohány Street Synagogue. To accommodate a million and a half, one would have had to replicate that building, its arches and domes, its Moorish interior, its balcony, its dark wooden pews and gilded ark, five hundred times. And then to envision each of those five hundred synagogues filled to capacity, to envision each man and woman and child inside as a unique and irreplaceable human being, the way he imagined Mendel Horovitz or the Ivory Tower or his brother Mátyás, each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain-to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time-how could anyone begin to grasp it? The idea could drive a person mad. He, Andras, was still alive, and people were dependent upon him; he couldn’t afford to lose his mind, and so he forced himself not to think about it.

Instead he buried himself in the work that had to be done every day. The single apartment, which had been full even when the men were away in the Munkaszolgálat, proved unlivable now that they were home. Tibor and Ilana took a flat across the street, and József moved with his parents into another small flat in the building next door. Polaner remained with Andras and Klara, sharing a room with Tamás. For all those living spaces, rent had to be paid. Andras went back to work as a newspaper illustrator and layout artist, not at the Magyar Jewish Journal but at the Evening Courier, Mendel’s former employer, where a new round of military conscriptions had decimated the ranks of graphic artists. He persuaded his editor to hire Polaner as well, arguing that Polaner had always been the true talent behind their collaborations in architecture school. Tibor, for his part, found a position as a surgical assistant in a military hospital, where the wounded of Voronezh were still being treated. József, who had never before had to earn a living, placed an ad in the Evening Courier and became a house painter, paid handsomely for his work. And Klara taught private students in the studio on Király utca. Few parents now could afford the full fee, but she allowed them to pay whatever they could.

In July, as Eisenhower’s armies bombed Rome, Budapest stood on the banks of the Danube in an excess of summer beauty, its palaces and grand old hotels still radiating an air of permanence. The Soviet bombardments of the previous September hadn’t touched those scrolled and gilded buildings; Allied raids had failed to materialize that spring, and the Red Army’s planes hadn’t returned. Now the clenched fists of dahlias opened in the Városliget, where Andras walked with Tibor and József and Polaner on Sunday afternoons, speculating about how much longer it might be before Germany capitulated and the war ended at last. Mussolini had fallen, and fascism had crumbled in Italy. On the Eastern Front, Germany ’s problems had multiplied and deepened: The Wehrmacht’s assault on a Soviet stronghold near Kursk had ended in a disastrous rout, and defeats at Orel and Kharkov had followed soon after. Even Tibor, who a year earlier had cautioned against wishful thinking, voiced the hope that the war might be over before he or Andras or József could be called to the Munkaszolgálat again, and that the Hungarian prisoners of war might begin to return.

The Jews of Hungary had been lucky, Andras knew. Thousands of men had died in the Munkaszolgálat, but not a million and a half. The rest of the Jewish population had survived the war intact. Though tens of thousands had lost their jobs and nearly all were struggling to make a living, it was still legal at least for a Jew to operate a business, own an apartment, go to synagogue to say the prayer for the dead. For more than a year and a half, Prime Minister Kállay had managed to stave off Hitler’s demands for more stringent measures against Hungary ’s Jews; what was more, his administration had begun to pursue justice for the crimes perpetrated earlier in the war. He had called for an investigation into the Délvidék massacres, and had vowed to punish the guilty parties as severely as they deserved. And General Vilmos Nagybaczoni Nagy, before he’d given up his control of the Ministry of Defense, had called for the indictment of the officers at the heart of the military black market.

But Andras had been schooled in skepticism not only by Tibor but by the events of the past year; despite the hopeful news, he found it impossible to shake his sense of dread. More events accrued to reinforce it. As he followed the black-market trial in the newspaper that fall, it became increasingly clear that the accused officers, if they were convicted, would carry only nominal sentences. And Hitler, whose Wehrmacht had looked so vulnerable during the summer months, had halted the Allied attack south of Rome and secured Germany ’s southern borders. In Russia he continued to throw his troops at the Red Army, as though total defeat were impossible.

Then there was the absence of news about Mátyás, who had been missing now for twenty-two months. How could anyone continue to believe he had survived? But Tibor persisted in believing it, and his mother believed it, and though his father wouldn’t speak of it, Andras knew he believed it; as long as any of them did, none of them could claim even the bare comfort of grief.

The year’s final act of aborted justice concerned the Hász family and the extortion that had drained its fortunes almost to nothing. Once György’s monthly payments had dwindled to a few hundred forint, the extortionists decided that the rewards of the arrangement were no longer worth the risk. The Kállay administration seemed intent upon exposing corruption at all levels and in all branches of the government; seventeen members of the Ministry of Justice had already been indicted for financial improprieties, and György’s extortionists feared they would be next. On the twenty-fifth of October they called György to a midnight meeting in the basement of the Ministry of Justice. That night, Andras and Klara kept a vigil with Klara’s mother and Elza and József in the small dark front room of the Hász apartment. József chain-smoked a pack of Mirjam cigarettes; Elza sat with a basket of mending beside her, needling her way through the unfamiliar ravages of poverty upon clothing. The elder Mrs. Hász read aloud from Radnóti, the young Jewish poet Tibor admired, and whose fate in the Munkaszolgálat was unknown. Klara, her hands pinned between her knees, sat beside Andras as if in judgment herself. If her brother came to harm, Andras knew she would hold herself responsible.