Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Andras and József listened in silence. If the rumors were true, if a German occupation was under way, Kállay’s government wouldn’t last the night; Andras could well imagine the kind of regime that would replace it. For six years now, he and the rest of the world had been receiving a lesson in German occupation and its effects. But what could be the purpose of an occupation now? The war was as good as lost for Germany. Everyone knew that. On all fronts, Hitler’s armies were close to collapse. Where would he even find the troops necessary to carry out an occupation? The Hungarian military wouldn’t take kindly to the idea of German command. There might be armed resistance, a patriotic backlash. The generals of the Honvédség would never submit without a fight, not after Hitler had thrown away so many Hungarian lives on the Eastern Front.

At their stop, Andras and József got off and stood on the pavement, looking up and down the street as if for some sign of the Wehrmacht. Saturday night seemed to be proceeding as before. Cabs tore along the boulevard with their cargos of partygoers, and the sidewalks were full of men and women in evening clothes.

“Are we supposed to believe this?” Andras said. “Am I supposed to bring this news home to Klara?”

“If it’s true, I’ll bet the army will put up a fight.”

“I was thinking that, too. But even if they do, how long can it last?”

József took out his cigarette case, and, finding it empty, drew a narrow silver flask from his breast pocket. He took a long pull, then offered it to Andras.

Andras shook his head. “I’ve had enough to drink,” he said, and turned toward home. They walked up Wesselényi to Nefelejcs utca, then turned and said a grim good-night at the doorstep, promising to see each other in the morning.

Upstairs in the darkened apartment, Tamás had joined Klara in bed, his spine nestled against her belly. When Andras climbed into bed with them, Tamás turned over and backed up against him, his bottom needling into Andras’s gut, his feet hot against Andras’s thigh. Klara sighed in her sleep. Andras put an arm around them both, wide awake, and lay for hours listening to their breathing.

At seven o’clock the next morning they woke to a pounding at the door. It was József, hatless and coatless, his shirtsleeves stained with blood. His father had just been arrested by the Gestapo. Klara’s mother had fallen into a dead faint moments after the men had taken György, and had struck her head on a coal fender; Elza was on the verge of nervous collapse. Andras must get Tibor at once, and Klara must come with József.

In the confused moments that followed, Klara insisted that it couldn’t have been the Gestapo, that József must have been mistaken. As he pulled on his boots, Andras had to tell her that it could in fact have been the Gestapo, that the city had been burning with rumors of a German occupation the night before. Andras ran to Tibor’s apartment and Klara to the Hászes’; a quarter of an hour later they were assembled around the bed of the elder Mrs. Hász, who had by then regained consciousness and insisted upon relating what had happened before her fall. Two Gestapo men had arrived at half past six that morning, had dragged György from his bed in his nightclothes, had shouted at him in German, and had pushed him into an armored car and taken him away. That was when she had lost her balance and taken a fall. She put a hand to her head, where a rectangle of gauze covered a gash from the fireplace fender.

“Why György?” she said. “Why would they take him? What did he do?”

No one could answer her. And within a few hours they began to hear of other arrests: a former colleague of György’s from the bank; the Jewish vice president of a bond-trading company; a prominent Leftist writer, a non-Jew, who had authored a bitter anti-Nazi pamphlet; three of Miklós Kállay’s closest advisors; and a liberal member of parliament, Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, who had met the Gestapo with a pistol in hand and had engaged them in a firefight before he’d been wounded and dragged away. That night József took the risk of going to inquire at the jail on Margit körút, where political prisoners were held, but was told only that his father was in German custody, and would be held until it could be proved that he didn’t constitute a threat to the occupation.

That was Sunday. By Monday the order had come for all Jewish citizens of Budapest to deliver their radios and telephones-volunteer was the word the Nazis used-to an office of the Ministry of Defense at Szabadság tér. By Wednesday it was decreed that any Jewish person who owned a car or bicycle had to sell it to the government for use in the war-sell was the word the Nazis used, but there was no money exchanged; the Nazis distributed payment vouchers that were soon discovered to be irredeemable for real currency. By Friday there were notices posted all over town notifying Jews that by April fifth they would be required to wear the yellow star. Soon afterward, the rumor began to circulate that the prominent Jews who had been arrested would be deported to labor camps in Germany. Klara went to the bank to withdraw what was left of their savings, hoping they might bribe someone into releasing György. But she found she could get no more than a thousand pengő all Jewish accounts had been frozen. The next day a new German order required Jews to surrender all jewelry and gold items. Klara and her mother and Elza gave up a few cheap pieces, hid their wedding bands and engagement rings in a pillowcase at the bottom of the flour bin, and packed the rest into velvet pouches, which József carried to the Margit körút prison to plead for his father’s release. The guards confiscated the jewelry, beat József black and blue, and threw him into the street.

On the twentieth of April, Tibor lost his position at the hospital. Andras and Polaner were dismissed from the Evening Courier and informed that they wouldn’t find work at any daily paper in town. József, employed informally and paid under the table, went on with his painting business, but his list of clients began to shrink. By the first week of May, signs had gone up in the windows of shops and restaurants, cafés and movie theaters and public baths, declaring that Jews were not welcome. Andras, coming home one afternoon from the park with Tamás, stopped short on the sidewalk across from their neighborhood bakery. In the window was a sign almost identical to the one he’d seen at the bakery in Stuttgart seven years earlier. But this sign was written in Hungarian, his own language, and this was his own street, the street where he lived with his wife and son. Struck faint, he sat down on the curb with Tamás and stared across the way into the lighted window of the shop. All looked ordinary there: the girl in her white cap, the glossy loaves and pastries in the case, the gold curlicues of the bakery’s name. Tamás pointed and said the name of the pastry he liked, mákos keksz. Andras had to tell him that there would be no mákos keksz that day. So much had become forbidden, and so quickly. Even being out on the streets was dangerous. There was a new five o’clock curfew for Jews; those who failed to comply could be arrested or shot. Andras pulled out his father’s pocket watch, as familiar now as if it were a part of his own body. Ten minutes to five. He got to his feet and picked up his son, and when he reached home, Klara met him at the door with his call-up notice in her hand.

THIS TIME they were together, Andras and József and Tibor; Polaner had been exempted, thanks to his false identity papers and medical-status documents. The labor battalions had been regrouped. Three hundred and sixty-five new companies had been added. Because Andras and József and Tibor lived in the same district, they had all been assigned to the 55/10th. Their send-off had been like a funeral at which the dead, the three young men, had been piled with goods to take into the next world. As much food as they could carry. Warm clothes. Woolen blankets. Vitamin pills and rolls of bandage. And in Tibor’s pack, drugs pilfered from the hospital where he had worked. Anticipating their call-up, he had felt no compunction about laying aside vials of antibiotic and morphine, packets of suture, sterile needles and scissors and clamps: a kit of tools he prayed he wouldn’t have to use.