Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

But nothing that happened to him those three cold years had prepared him for what waited at home. Nothing had prepared him for the news that four hundred thousand of Hungary’s Jews had been sent to death camps in Poland; nothing had prepared him for the bombed ruin of Budapest with its six severed bridges. And nothing had prepared him for the news that his mother and father, his brother and his sister-in-law and his nephew, had all vanished from the earth. It was Andras who delivered the news. Mátyás, grown into a lean, hard-eyed man with a short dark beard, sat before him on the sofa and took it in without a sound; the only sign he gave of having understood at all was a faint trembling of the jaw. He got up and smoothed his pant legs, as if, having been given a military briefing, he was ready now to incorporate the news into his plans and move onward. And then something seemed to change beneath the skin of his face, as though his muscles had received the news on a longdistance telephone delay. He went to his knees on the floor, his features twisting with grief. “Not true,” he cried, and moved his arms around his head as if birds were flying at him. It was the news, Andras thought, the unrelenting news, a troop of crows circling, their wings smelling of ash.

He knelt beside his brother and put his arms around him, held him against his own chest as Mátyás wailed. He said his brother’s name aloud, as if to remind him of the astonishing fact that at least, he, Mátyás, still lived. He would not let go until Mátyás pulled away and looked around at the unfamiliar room; when his eyes came to rest on Andras’s again, they were lucid and full of despair. Is it true? he seemed to be asking, though he hadn’t said a word. Tell me honestly. Is it true?

Andras held Mátyás’s gaze steady in his own. There was no need to speak or to make any sign. He put his arm around Mátyás’s shoulder again, drew him close and held him as he cried.

It was Andras who sat with him that night and the next and the one after that, Andras who urged him to eat and who changed the damp bedding on the sofa where he slept. As he did these things he felt the first thinning of the fog that had enveloped him since he’d learned that Tibor was dead. Over the past month he’d nearly forgotten how to be a man in the world, how to breathe and eat and sleep and speak to other people. He had let himself slip away, even though Klara and the children had survived the war, the siege; even though Polaner was there with him every day. On the third night after Mátyás’s return, after Mátyás had fallen asleep and he and Klara had retreated to their bedroom, Andras took her hands and begged her forgiveness.

“You know there’s nothing to forgive,” she said.

“I vowed to take care of you. I want to be a husband to you again.”

“You’ve never stopped,” she said.

He bent to kiss her; she was alive, his Klara, and she was there in his arms. Nest of my children, he thought, placing a hand on her womb. Cradle of my joy. And he remembered her with an orange-red dahlia behind her ear, and the way her skin felt beneath a film of bathwater, and what it was like to meet her eye and to know they were thinking the same thing. And he believed, for the first time since he had seen Tibor’s name on the list at Bethlen Gábor tér, that it might be possible to live beyond that terrible year; that he might look into Klara’s face, whose planes and curves he knew more intimately than any landscape in the world, and feel something like peace. And he took her to bed and made love to her as if for the first time in his life.

THE MORNING was crisp and blue, early December. From the window of their building on Pozsonyi út, Andras could see a line of schoolchildren being led into Szent István Park -gray woolen coats, crimson scarves, black boots that left herringbones of footprints in the snow. Beyond the park was the marbled span of the Danube. Farther still was the white prow of Margaret Island, where in the summertime Tamás and Április swam at Palatinus Strand. When, on a walk through the park last spring, he’d told them that the pool had once been closed to Jewish swimmers, Április had looked at him with pinched brows.

“I don’t see what being Jewish has to do with swimming,” she said.

“Neither do I,” Andras said, and put a hand at the nape of her neck, where her little gold chain closed. But Tamás had looked through the fence at the pool complex, his hands on the green-painted bars, then turned to meet his father’s eyes. He knew by now what had happened to his family during the war, what had happened to his uncles and grandparents. He had gone to Konyár and Debrecen with his father to see where Andras had lived as a boy, and where Andras’s parents had lived; he had watched his father place a stone on the doorstep of the house in Konyár as if at a grave.

“I’m going to train for the Olympics here,” he said. “I’ll set a new world record.”

“Me too,” Április said. “I’ll set a record in freestyle and backstroke.”

“I have no doubt you will,” Andras said.

That was before the escape had come to seem like a reality, before the children had begun to envision their future lives taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. It wouldn’t be long now; only a few details remained, including the business Andras would conclude that morning at the Ministry of the Interior. Tamás had wanted to come along with Andras and Klara and Mátyás to pick up the new identification cards. Last night he’d stood before Andras in the sitting room with a grave expression on his face, his arms crossed over his chest. He had already prepared his lessons for the next two days, he announced. He’d miss nothing at all by going with them.

“You have to go to school,” Andras said. He rose from his chair and put an arm around Tamás’s shoulders. “You don’t want the students in America to get ahead of you.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Tamás said. “Not if I miss just one afternoon. They get Saturdays and Sundays off every week.”

“I’ll leave your new papers on your desk,” Andras said. “They’ll be waiting for you when you get home from school.”

Tamás sent a glance toward Klara, who sat at her writing desk by the window; she shook her head and said, “You heard your father.”

Shrugging, sighing, declaring it all to be unfair, Tamás gave up the argument and loped off down the hallway to his room. “As if I’d get behind,” they heard him say as he closed the bedroom door.

Klara lifted her eyes to Andras, trying to restrain her laughter. “He’s been a grown man for years, hasn’t he?” she said. “What on earth will he do in America, among those kids with their banana splits and their rock and roll?”

“He’ll eat banana splits and listen to rock and roll,” Andras predicted, which turned out, in fact, to be true.

Andras and Mátyás had taken the day off work to go to the Ministry of the Interior. They were employed at Magyar Nation, one of the secondary communist newspapers, where they directed the design department; they had been up late the previous night judging a contest of winter-themed drawings by gimnázium students. The winning drawing had depicted a skating race, athletics being a safe subject under the judging regulations, which disqualified any drawing that made reference to Christmas. That holiday belonged to the old Hungary, at least officially. Of course, people still celebrated it; they were relying on that fact, all of them-Andras and Mátyás, Klara and Tamás and Április. In a few weeks, on Christmas Eve, they would take a train to Sopron, and then they would walk six miles in the snow to a place where they might cross the Austrian border unnoticed; they would slip through while the border patrol drank vodka and listened to Christmas carols in their warm quarters. In Austria they would catch a train that would take them to Vienna, where Polaner had been living since his own border crossing in November. From there they would travel together to Salzburg, and then to Marseilles. On the tenth of January, if all went well, they would board an ocean liner for New York, where József Hász had secured an apartment for them.