Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Don’t be sentimental,” her mother had said, her eyes calm and steady on Klara’s. “Trade them for bread if you have to.” She’d made Klara slip the rings onto her finger, had given her a brusque kiss of the kind she’d always given Klara in the mornings before school, and then she’d gone inside to pack what little she could take to the ghetto.

Polaner had volunteered to escort Klara and Ilana the fourteen blocks they would have to walk to the shelter. In his pocket he carried the Walther P-38 given to him by the officer who’d arranged his safe passage to Hungary, and in his arms he carried Tamás, who had become inseparable from Polaner during the turmoil of the past months. At the doorway of the Red Cross building on Perczel Mór utca, Tamás, faced with the prospect of Polaner’s departure, raised such an uproar that the shelter director told Polaner he could stay the night to help the women and children settle in. The director was the mother of a little girl whom Klara had taught a few years earlier. The girl, who had died of scarlet fever, had been a favorite of Klara’s, and her mother wanted to do whatever she could to help. In gratitude for her kindness, Polaner explained that his false papers and his Nazi Party identity card might allow him to be of help to the women and children of the shelter; at least until the Russians arrived, he would have a certain freedom of movement in the city. By morning he had taken an inventory of the many things the shelter’s inmates needed. Milk for the babies was at the top of the list. So the first gift he brought to the shelter was half a dozen goats: the wethers, the does, and two of the three kids that had been living in the carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanády utca. Klein’s grandmother had entrusted them to Polaner’s care that morning when she and her husband had departed for the Seventh District ghetto, taking the last kid with them.

The Red Cross shelter was housed on the second story of the building, in three rooms of what had once been an insurance office. Mothers who had arrived in fur coats and custom-made shoes sat on desk chairs or on the floor, nursing their babies alongside those who had come with their feet wrapped in newspaper. Day and night the women filled the shelter with urgent talk and weeping and low infrequent laughter. They soothed the babies with songs, tried to distract the two- and three-year-olds with hand games and improvised toys. Pebble-filled pillboxes became rattles; dirty rags became pigtailed dolls. The mothers took turns washing their babies’ diapers in a laundry room on the ground floor, their only source of running water. When bombs broke the windows and the building became so cold that the newly washed diapers froze, they wrapped the diapers around themselves at night and dried them with the heat of their bodies. Ten times a day, it seemed, they rushed down to the shelter beneath the building and huddled there while bombs fell all around Szabadság tér.

Polaner worked tirelessly for the women and children. He scrounged rags for diapers; he stole the women’s own winter clothing back from the apartments they’d been forced to leave. At night, in violation of the city-wide curfew, he gleaned fodder for the goats from abandoned stables and from the garbage that had begun to pile in the streets. On his travels through the neighborhood he discovered the secret Jewish hospital on Zichy Jenő utca, a few blocks from the shelter, where an Armenian doctor named Ara Jerezian had assembled forty Jewish physicians and their families. The Arrow Cross flag flew over the shelter entrance, and Jerezian wore the official Nyilas uniform. He had renounced his party membership years earlier, in protest against the Arrow Cross’s anti-Jewish policies, but had taken it up again when he realized he might work secretly for the Jews from inside the party. Under the pretense of setting up a hospital for the Arrow Cross wounded, he’d assembled the Jewish doctors and their families and had laid in a store of food and medicine. Now, in those cramped apartments that had become a hospital, the doctors were treating the horrific casualties of the siege. Polaner brought sick women and babies from the Red Cross shelter to that hospital and took them back again when they were better. In return for the doctors’ attention, he gave their hungry children what little goat’s milk could be spared.

All over the city, people were beginning to starve. The first weeks of December the Red Cross shelter had been supplied with soup, which had to be transported on a cart from a kitchen on the other side of Szabadság tér. When the soup ran out there were soybeans and potatoes in their own cooking water; then just the soybeans; then, finally, nothing except what the goats produced on their own starvation diet. The women of the shelter pooled their jewelry and gave it to Polaner so he might trade it for food; Klara slipped her mother’s wedding band and engagement ring into the bag with the rest. But Polaner returned empty-handed. The women’s jewelry was worth nothing. There was no food to be had. Even the scant running water had ceased to run. Their only water now came from melted snow they’d brought in from the courtyard. The women became sick with hunger and thirst, and a drought of milk spread through the shelter. At first the children cried, but by the beginning of January they had become too weak to protest. One by one they went silent, their breathing a fluttering of wings beneath the breastbone. That was when Polaner did what Klein’s grandmother had instructed him to do if the situation grew dire. That gentle textile-maker’s son, the dovelike young man skilled with pen and protractor, killed the goats and their kids with his Walther P-38, then turned them over to one of the shelter’s inmates, a woman whose husband had been a butcher and who knew what to do with Polaner’s knife.

A week later, on the eighth of January, Klara’s labor began. Ilana insisted that she must go to the hospital on Zichy Jenő utca; after two cesarean sections, she could hardly risk labor at the shelter. Ilana herself would care for Tamás. She kissed Klara and assured her that all would be well. Then Klara and Polaner struggled through a network of smoke-darkened alleys to Ara Jerezian’s hospital. As the fighting drew closer, the halls of the hospital had become clogged with horrifically wounded soldiers; men lay crying and sweating and panting on cots along the walls, and the hallways were slick with blood. The doctors could scarcely pause to consider the situation of a healthy woman in labor, whatever her history. Klara and Polaner waited in a makeshift kitchen for three hours until a series of contractions brought her to her hands and knees. At last Polaner begged the help of Ara Jerezian himself, who took Klara to his office and made a pallet for her on the floor. Polaner brought water, sponged Klara’s forehead, changed her soaked sheets as she labored. When it became clear that the baby was in the breech position, and that Klara couldn’t deliver without a cesarean, Dr. Jerezian brought her to an impromptu operating theater-three metal tables lit only by a bank of high windows-and anesthetized her with morphine as the steadfast Polaner averted his eyes. Klara woke to learn she’d had a girl, whom she named Április in the hope that she would live to see the spring. And Polaner observed that the baby resembled her father.

For five days Klara recovered in Jerezian’s office. Whatever food Polaner could find in the hospital, he brought to her. He tended her wound, cooled her forehead with wet cloths, held the baby while she slept. The baby, tiny at birth, gained weight on Klara’s milk. When at last they carried her home to the Red Cross shelter, they found Tamás silent and glassy-eyed in the director’s arms. Where was Ilana? they asked. Where was the boy’s aunt, who was supposed to care for him? The director regarded them for a moment in silence, her mouth trembling, and then she told them.