Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Ádám Lévi had died of a fever on the twelfth of January. In a delirium of grief, his mother had run out into the street, where a Russian shell had killed her.

The fighting continued in Pest for six more days. The Russian forces drew close now to the center of the city, seeming to converge upon Szabadság tér itself; artillery fire shook the building day and night. Klara, in a shock of grief and fear, huddled in the bomb shelter with the baby while Tamás clung to Polaner. She would die without seeing her husband again; if he lived, how would he even learn of her death, of their children’s deaths? It was possible he might never learn he’d had a daughter. A shame she doesn’t have a future. What kind of future could be imagined after such a time? That night, when Polaner ventured out to get water at a standpipe across the street, he returned with the news that Nyugati Station was on fire, and that Hungarian soldiers were fleeing in the direction of the Danube bridges. That infernal glow along the Danube was the conflagration of the grand hotels. Flames climbed the dome and spire of Parliament. Civilians rushed toward the river with their dogs and bags and children, but the bridges were under bombardment. In the whole city there was nothing left to eat. Klara received the last piece of news with the understanding that she would watch her children die. Later that night, when a shallow panicked sleep overtook her, she dreamed of feeding her own right hand to the children; she felt no pain, only a relief that she had arrived at this ingenious solution.

In the morning she woke to an unaccustomed quiet. In place of gunfire there was a resonant stillness. Now and then a burst of shots cut through the morning air, and from the west bank of the Danube, where the fighting continued, came the faint echo of battle. But the battle for Pest was over. The bridges had all been destroyed; the Soviets held the city. The last Nazis in Pest had been taken as prisoners of war, or were cowering in buildings where they had made others cower. In the Red Cross shelter, the women waited for some sign of what to do. They were faint with thirst and hunger, sick with grief; though the building had withstood the night’s bombing, two more babies had died. The children who had survived were quieter that day, as if they knew something had changed. By midday the shelter residents came out of the building and into the cold gray light of Szabadság tér. What they saw seemed like an image from a newsreel or a dream: the American flag flying brazenly above the shuttered embassy. Two Arrow Cross soldiers lay dead on the embassy steps, the breasts of their overcoats tattered with bullet holes. A pair of Russian military policemen stood at the edge of the square and stared at the smoking dome of the Parliament building. The director of the shelter crossed the square toward the Russian men and fell to her knees before them; they could understand nothing she said, but they offered her their canteens.

That afternoon, the inhabitants of the shelter began to leave in search of food and water. Klara and Polaner lined the babies’ carriages with extra blankets and packed them with what remained of what they’d brought. Into Ádám’s empty carriage they put Tamás, who, for the past week, had had nothing to eat but the scant trickle of Klara’s milk. Into the other carriage they put the new baby. Klara, blind with exhaustion, could scarcely walk. They made their way through the rubble of the city, not knowing where they were going; they steered the carriages around crashed planes, horse carcasses, exploded German tanks, fallen chimneys, piles of rubbish, bodies of soldiers, bodies of women. At the corner of Király and Kazinczy utca they came across a group of Russian soldiers shoveling rubble into the back of a truck. Their leader, a decorated officer, stopped Klara and Polaner and made a loud demand in Russian. They knew he wanted their papers, but Polaner’s papers could only have gotten him arrested or shot; he replied in Hungarian that Klara was his wife and that they were bringing the children home. For a long time the officer looked at the gaunt, hollow-eyed Klara and Polaner, and peered into the carriages at the silent children. Finally he reached into the pocket of his coat and brought out a photograph of a round-faced woman with a round-faced child seated on her knee. While Klara held the photograph, the soldier went to the cab of the truck and took out a canvas rucksack. Kneeling, he drew out a paper bag that bulged as though it contained stones, then reached into the bag and withdrew a handful of wizened hazelnuts. These he passed to Klara. A second handful of nuts went to Polaner.

On those two handfuls of food, Klara would nurse both children for a week.

Because there was nowhere else to go, they went to the ghetto, which had been liberated by the Russians earlier that day. There, at the gates of the Great Synagogue on Dohány utca, they found Klein’s grandmother holding the single goat kid she’d nursed through the siege. Klein’s grandfather, that tiny bright-eyed man with his two uplifted wings of hair, had died of a stroke the first week of January. He’d been taken to the courtyard of the synagogue, where hundreds of Jewish dead lay waiting to be buried.

What about my mother? Klara had asked. What about my brother’s wife?

And in the same grief-raked voice, Klein’s grandmother delivered the news that Elza Hász and Klara’s mother had been shot, along with forty others, in the courtyard of a building on Wesselényi utca. She spoke the words with lowered eyes as she stroked the head of the last surviving kid, the remnant of the urban flock that had saved the lives of thirty women and children at Szabadság tér.

In the courtyard of the synagogue at Bethlen Gábor tér, where the concentration-camp survivors were supposed to register when they returned, those who had remained in Budapest begged the camp survivors for news of those who hadn’t come home. Nearly every day until Andras’s return, Klara had gone to that synagogue. Though she feared the answers to her questions, she had asked and asked. One week she met a man who’d been in a camp in Germany with her brother; they’d been workmates at an armaments factory there. This man took her into the synagogue sanctuary, where he sat down with her in a pew, took her hands in his own, and told her that her brother was dead. He’d been shot on New Year’s Eve along with twenty-five others.

For a week she sat shivah for him at the house on Frangepán kóz; as far as she knew, she was the only member of their family still alive. Then she went back to the synagogue again, hoping for news of Andras. Instead she learned something that she must tell him now. A woman from Debrecen had come to Bethlen Gábor tér to look for her children. Not long before, this woman had been in a camp herself; she had been in Oświęcim, in Poland. She had seen Andras’s parents on a railroad embankment there, before she herself had been moved into a group of those who were well enough to work. Of the other group, the old and sick and very young, nothing more had been seen, nothing heard.

As Klara delivered the news, Andras began to shake with silent grief. József sat beside him in hollow-eyed shock. In a single day, in this strange small house filled with photographs of the dead, they had both become orphans.

…

For months after Andras came home, they went to the synagogue at Bethlen Gábor tér every day. Hungarian Jews were being exhumed from graves all over Austria and Germany, Ukraine and Yugoslavia, and, whenever it was possible, identified by their papers or their dog tags. There were thousands of them. Every day, on the wall outside the building, endless lists of names. Abraham. Almasy. Arany. Banki. Böhm. Braun. Breuer. Budai. Csato. Czitrom. Dániel. Diamant. Einstein. Eisenkberger. Engel. Fischer. Goldman. Goldner. Goldstein. Hart. Hauszmann. Heller. Hirsch. Honig. Horovitz. Idesz. János. Jáskiseri. Kemény. Kepecs. Kertész. Klein. Kovacs. Langer. Lázár. Lindenfeld. Markovitz. Martón. Nussbaum. Ócsai. Paley. Pollák. Róna. Rosenthal. Roth. Rubiczek. Rubin. Schoenfeld. Sebestyen. Sebök. Steiner. Szanto. Toronyi. Ungar. Vadas. Vámos. Vertes. Vida. Weisz. Wolf. Zeller. Zindler. Zucker. An alphabet of loss, a catalogue of grief. Almost every time they went, they witnessed someone learning that a person they loved had died. Sometimes the news would be received in silence, the only evidence a whitening of the skin around the mouth, or a tremor in the hands that clutched a hat. Other times there would be screams, protests, weeping. They looked day after day, every day, for so long that they almost forgot what they were looking for; after a while it seemed they were just looking, trying to memorize a new Kaddish composed entirely of names.