Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Those things Andras remembered in detail. More confusing was what had passed between then and now. Through the haze of his fever he tried and tried to remember what had happened to Tibor. He remembered, weeks or months earlier, fleeing with Tibor and József along a road west of Trebišov on a bright day, pursued by the sound of Russian tanks and Russian gunfire. They’d been separated from their company; József had been sick and couldn’t keep up. German jeeps and armored cars shot along the road beside them. Approaching from behind, an earthquake: Russians in their rolling fortresses, guns blazing. As they fled along the road, József had stumbled into the path of a German armored car. He’d been thrown into a ditch, his leg twisted into an angle that was-the fevered Andras grasped in darkness for the word-unrealistic. It was unrealistic; it did not represent life. A leg did not bend in that way, or in that direction, in relation to a man’s body. When Andras reached him, József was open-eyed, breathing fast and shallow; he seemed in a state of strange exultation, as though in one quick stroke he’d been vindicated on a point he’d argued fruitlessly for years. Tibor bent beside him and put a careful hand to the leg, and József released an unforgettable sound: a grating three-toned shriek that seemed to crack the dome of the sky. Tibor drew back and gave Andras a look of despair: He was out of morphine, the supplies he’d hoarded in Budapest exhausted by now. Moments later, it seemed, an olive-colored van had appeared, Austrian Wehrmacht flags fluttering at its bumpers, a red cross painted on its side. Andras tore the yellow armband from his sleeve, from József’s, from Tibor’s; now they were just three men in a ditch, without identity. Austrian medics arrived, judged them all in need of immediate medical care, and loaded them into the van. Soon they were moving along the road at an incredible rate of speed-still fleeing before the Russians, Andras imagined. Then there was a burst of deafening noise, a brilliant explosion. The canvas of the van tore away, floor became ceiling, a tire traced an arc against a backdrop of clouds. A jolt of impact. A thrumming silence. From somewhere close by, József calling for his father, of all people. Tibor stood unharmed amid dry cornstalks, dusting snow from his sleeves. Andras, a wild white pain abloom in his side, lay in a furrow of the field and stared at the sky, an impossibly high milk blue stretching forever above him. In his memory a cloud took the shape of the Panthéon, a suggestion of columns and a dome. A moment later that milky blue, that dome, disappeared into an enfolding darkness.

Later he had opened his eyes to a vision so blinding he was certain he had died. Snow-white walls, snow-white bedstead, snow-white curtains, snow-white sky outside the window. He came to understand that he was lying on a hospital cot, under the excruciating weight of a thin cotton blanket. A doctor with a Yugoslav name, Dobek, removed a bandage from Andras’s side and examined a red-toothed wound that extended from beneath his lowest rib to just above his navel. The sight of it brought on a wave of nausea so deep that Andras looked around in panic for a bedpan, and the motion called forth a shearing pain inside the wound. The doctor begged Andras not to move. Andras understood, though the admonition came in a language he didn’t know. He lay back and fell into a dreamless sleep. When he woke, Tibor was sitting in a chair beside the cot, his glasses unbroken, his hair clean, his face washed, his labor-service rags exchanged for cotton pajamas. Andras had been wounded, he explained; the medical van had hit a mine. He’d had to have emergency surgery. His spleen had been damaged, his small intestine severed near the terminal ileum; but all had been repaired, and he was recovering well. Where were they? In Kassa, Slovakia, in a Catholic hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, under the care of Slovak nuns. And where was József? Recovering in a neighboring ward; his leg had been shattered, and he’d had a complicated surgery.

They lay in that Slovak hospital, he and József, for an indeterminate number of weeks; he lay there recovering from his terrible wound, and József from his complex fracture, while a war raged nearby. Tibor came and went. He was serving the nuns, the doctors, working at their side, assisting in surgery, triaging new patients who came in. He was exhausted, grim with the sight of bullet- and bomb-ravaged bodies, but there was a calm purpose in his expression: He was doing what he’d been trained to do. The Russians were making progress, he told Andras, slowly but steadily. If the hospital could survive the onslaught of the battle, they might all be safe soon.

But then the Nazis arrived to clear the hospital. Evacuate was the word they used, though the meaning wasn’t the same for everyone. In that place where no patient had been asked his religion, no distinction made between gentile and Jew, the Jews were now identified and herded into a corridor. Andras and Tibor supported József between them, his leg unwieldy in its plaster cast, and the three of them were marched to a train and loaded onto a boxcar. Again they rolled off into the unknown, south and west this time, toward Hungary.

For nearly a week they traveled across the country. Tibor gleaned what he could about their location from the shouts he overheard when the train stopped, or from the little he could see from the tiny window in the bolted door. They were at Alsózsolca, then at Mezökövesd, then at Hatvan; there was a moment of wild hope that they might turn south toward Budapest, but the train rolled onward toward Vác. They skirted the border near Esztergom and traveled for a time along the ice-choked Danube, then through Komárom and Győr and Kapuvár, toward the western border. All that way, Tibor had cared for Andras and József, preserving their delicate recovery. When Andras vomited on the boxcar floor, Tibor cleaned him, and when József had to use the can at the back of the car, Tibor walked him there and helped him. He ministered to the other patients, too, many of whom were too sick to understand their luck. But there was little he could do. There was no food, no water, not a clean bandage or a dose of medicine. At night Tibor lay beside Andras for warmth, and whispered in Andras’s ear as if to keep them both from losing their minds. Let me tell you a story, Tibor said, as if Andras were the son Tibor had left behind. Once there was a man who could speak to animals. Here is what the man said. Here is what the animals said. A vast deep itching spread over every inch of Andras’s body, even inside the wound: the bites of lice. A few days later came the first tendrils of fever.

When the train stopped, it meant that they had reached the edge of the country. Again they were to be sorted into two groups: those who could cross and those who could not cross. Those who had typhus wouldn’t be allowed to cross. They would be placed in a quarantine camp on the border.

“Listen to me, Andras,” Tibor had said, just before the selection. “I’m going to pretend to be ill. I’m not going to be sent over the border. I’m going to stay with you here in the quarantine camp. Do you understand?”

“No, Tibor. If you stay, you’ll get sick for certain.” He thought of Mátyás, the long-ago illness, his own desperate night in the orchard.

“And if I go on ahead?”

“You have a skill. They need it. They’ll keep you alive.”

“They don’t care about my skill. I’m going to stay here with you and József and the others.”

“No, Tibor.”

“Yes.”

The boxcars became the barracks of the quarantine camp. At the station they were left on the switching rails, rows and rows of them, each with its cargo of dead and dying men. Every day the dead were hauled out of the cars and lined up beneath them on the frozen ground; it was impossible to bury them at that time of year. Andras lay on the floor of the boxcar in a rising fever, floating just inches above his dead comrades. He’d had no word from Klara in months, and no way to get word to her. Their second child would already have been born, or would not have been. Tamás would be nearly three years old. They might have been deported, or might not have been. He drifted in and out, knowing and not knowing, thinking and unable to think, as his brother slipped out of the quarantine camp and walked into Sopron for food, medicine, news. Every day Tibor returned with what little he could glean; he befriended a pharmacist who supplied him with small amounts of antibiotic and aspirin and morphine, and whose radio picked up BBC News. Budapest had been under a grave threat since early November. Soviet tanks were on the approach from the southwest. Hitler had vowed to hold them off at all costs. Roads were blocked. Food and fuel supplies were running short. The capital had already begun to starve. Tibor would never have delivered that grim news to Andras, but Andras overheard him speaking to someone outside the boxcar; his fever-sharpened hearing carried every word.