Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

From the crowd, a single beat of silence; then they roared in celebration and threw their hats into the air. For that moment it didn’t seem to matter that Hungary had been on the losing side, that its shining capital on the Danube had been bombed to rubble, that the country had fallen under Soviet control, that its people had nothing to eat, that its prisoners still hadn’t returned, that its dead were gone forever. What mattered was that the war in Europe was over. Andras and József put their arms around each other and wept.

The hills east of Buda had come into their young leaves, insensate to the dead and the grieving. The flowering lindens and plane trees seemed almost obscene to Andras, inappropriate, like girls in transparent lawn dresses at a funeral. He and József hiked the ruined streets on the east side of Castle Hill; at the top they paused and stood looking out over the city in silence. The beautiful bridges of the Danube-Margaret Bridge, the Chain Bridge, the Elizabeth Bridge, all those bridges whose every inch Andras knew by heart, every one of them as far as he could see-lay in ruins, their steel cables and concrete supports melting into the sand-colored rush of the river. The Royal Palace had been bombed into the shape of a crumbling comb, a Roman lady’s hair ornament excavated from an ancient city. The hotels on the far side of the river had fallen to ruins; they seemed to kneel on the riverbank in belated supplication.

In wordless shock, avoiding each other’s eyes, Andras and József stumbled down through the streets of the old city toward the bridgeless river. They knew they had to cross, knew that whatever waited for them waited on the far bank, amid the remains of Pest. Near Ybl Miklós tér, the square named for the architect who had designed the Operaház, they found a slip where a line of boatmen waited to ferry passengers across. For their passage they traded their last six packages of cigarettes and a dozen large batteries. The boatman, a red-faced boy in a straw hat, looked exceptionally well fed. As the boat cut toward the opposite shore, the feeling in Andras’s chest was like a hand raked through the tissue of his lungs; his diaphragm contracted with a spasm so painful he couldn’t breathe. The boat, a leaking skiff, made a shaky downstream progress across the river, twice threatening to capsize before it delivered them sick and shaking to the shore of Pest. They climbed out onto the wet sand beneath the embankment, the water lapping their shoes. Then they ascended the stone steps and stared up into a corridor of ruined buildings. On either side, a few buildings stood intact; some had even retained the colored tiles of their decorative mosaics, the leaves and flowers of their Baroque ornamentation. But Andras and József’s path toward the center of town led them through a museum of destruction: endless piles of bricks, splintered beams, shattered tiles, fractured concrete. The dead had been moved out of the street long before, but crosses stood on every corner. Signs of ordinary life presented themselves as if in total ignorance of this disaster: a clean shop window full of dough twisted into the usual shapes; a red bicycle reclining against a stoop; from far away, the improbable clang of a streetcar bell. Farther along, the skeleton of a German plane protruded from the top story of a building. A section of burned wing had fallen to the ground; the rust along its edges suggested it had lain there for months. A dog sniffed the blackened steel ribs of the wing and trotted off down the street.

They went along together toward Nefelejcs utca, toward the buildings where their families had lived-the building where József had said goodbye to his mother and grandmother; the building where Tibor and Ilana had moved after Andras’s return; the building where Andras and Klara had crouched together on the bathroom floor the night before his departure. They turned the corner from Thököly út and passed the familiar greengrocer’s, empty of green, and the familiar sweet shop, empty of sweets. At the corner of Nefelejcs utca and István út was a pile of wreckage, a mountain of plaster and stone and wood and brick and tile. Across the street, where József’s family and Tibor and Ilana had lived, there was nothing at all. Not even a ruin. Andras stood and stared.

Later he would say of himself, “That was when I lost my head.” It was the closest he could come to describing the feeling: His head had departed from his body, had been sent, like the evacuated children of Europe, somewhere dull and distant and safe. His body went to its knees in the street. He wanted to tear his clothing but found he couldn’t move. He wouldn’t listen to József, wouldn’t consider that his wife and child, or children, might have left the building before it had been destroyed. He couldn’t see anyone or anything. Passersby moved around him as he knelt on the pavement.

He might have stayed there an hour, or two, or five. József seated himself on an upturned cinderblock and waited. Andras was aware of him as a kind of fine tether, a monofilament connecting him, against his will, to what was left of the world. His eyes, unfocused on the ruin of the building, filled and drained and filled again. And then a familiar sound resolved from the nebula of his dulled senses: the sound of delicate hooves on pavement, the jingle of twin bells. The sound approached until it reached him, then went still. He raised his eyes.

It was the tiny grandmother of Klein, and her goat cart, newly painted white.

“My God,” she said, and stared at him. “Is it Andras? Is it Andras Lévi?”

He took her hand and kissed it. “You remember me,” he said. “Thank God. Do you know anything about my wife? Klara Lévi? Do you remember her, too?”

“Get up,” she said. “Let me take you to my house.”

The house in Frangepán köz stood in its ancient silence, in a haze of dust suspended in the viscous light of late afternoon. In the yard, a quartet of tiny goatlets nosed at a bucket of breadcrusts. Andras ran the stone path to the door, which stood open as if to admit the breeze. Inside, on the sofa where Andras had first waited to see Klein, lay his wife, Klara Lévi, asleep, alive. At the other end of the sofa was his son, Tamás, deep in a nap, his mouth open. Andras knelt beside them as if in prayer. Tamás’s skin was flushed with sleep, his forehead pink, his eyes fluttering beneath the lids. Klara seemed farther away, scarcely breathing, her skin a luminous white film over her faintly beating life. Her hair had come out of its coil and lay over her shoulder in a twisted rope. Her arm was crooked around a sleeping baby in a white blanket, the baby’s hand an open star on Klara’s half-bare breast.

My pole star, Andras thought. My true north.

Klara stirred, opened her eyes, looked down at the baby and smiled. Then she became aware of another presence in the room, an unfamiliar shape. Instinctively she drew her blouse over her breast, covering that slip of damp white skin.

She raised her eyes to Andras and blinked as if he were the dead. She pressed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger and then looked again.

Andras.

Klara.

They wailed each other’s names into the ancient space of that room, into that dust-storm of antique sunlight; their little boy, their son, woke with a start and began to cry in panic, unable to distinguish joy from grief. And perhaps at that moment joy and grief were the same thing, a flood that filled the chest and opened the throat: This is what I have survived without you, this is what we have lost, this is what is left, what we have to live with now. The baby raised a high wet voice. They were together, Klara and Andras and Tamás, and this little girl whose name her father did not know.