Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

But first they had to settle the business about the name change and the new identity cards. They had submitted the application eight weeks earlier, in October; it had gotten delayed, like all other government business, in the confusion surrounding the abortive revolution that fall. Even now, less than a month after it had been quelled, Andras found it difficult to believe the revolution had occurred-that the public debates of the Petőfi Society, a small group of Budapest intellectuals, had blossomed into vast student demonstrations; that the students and their supporters had unseated Ernő Gerő, Moscow’s puppet, and had installed the reformist Imre Nagy as prime minister; that they had pulled down the twenty-meter-high statue of Stalin near Heroes’ Square, and planted Hungarian flags in his empty boots. The demonstrators had called for free elections, a multiparty system, a free press. They wanted Hungary to disengage from the Warsaw Pact, and more than anything they wanted the Red Army to go home. They wanted to be Hungarian again, even after what it had meant to be Hungarian during the war. And at first, Khrushchev had conceded. He had recognized Nagy as prime minister, and began to call the occupying troops back to Russia. For a few days in late October it seemed to Andras that the Hungarian Revolution would be the swiftest, the cleanest, the most successful revolution Europe had ever known. Then Polaner came home one afternoon having heard a rumor that Soviet tanks were massing at the Romanian and Ruthenian borders. That evening, in the Erzsébetváros café where Andras and Polaner went to hear Jewish artists and writers argue long into the night, the item of hottest debate was whether the Western nations would come to Hungary ’s aid. Radio Free Europe had led many to believe it would be so, but others insisted that no Western nation would risk itself for a Soviet-bloc state. The cynics turned out to be correct. France and Britain, preoccupied with the Suez Crisis, scarcely cast an eye toward Central Europe; America was caught up in a presidential election, and kept to itself.

More than twenty-five hundred people were killed, and nineteen thousand wounded, when Khrushchev’s tanks and planes arrived to crush the uprising. Imre Nagy had hidden himself in the Yugoslav embassy, and was imprisoned as soon as he emerged. Within days the fighting was over. In the weeks that followed, nearly two hundred thousand people fled to the West-among them Polaner, whose image had appeared in one of the many newspapers that had arisen during Hungary’s fortnight of freedom. He had been photographed tending a young woman who’d been shot in the leg at Heroes’ Square; the woman turned out to be a student organizer, and Polaner had been tagged as a revolutionary. Grim tales of torture had emerged from the Secret Police detainment center at 60 Andrássy út; rather than test their truth, Polaner had decided to risk the border crossing. To his good fortune, and that of the two hundred thousand refugees, the brief conflict had left the Iron Curtain riddled with holes: Many of the border guards had been called in to fight smaller uprisings in the towns and cities of the interior.

Those conflicts, too, had since been put down, but the border remained more permeable than it had been for years. It was decided that the rest of the family would follow Polaner. How long now had they been waiting for a chance to leave? There was no future for them in Hungary. They’d known it to be true before the revolution, and it was all the more apparent now. József Hász, who had made his own escape to New York five years earlier, had been at pains to convince them that they were fools to stay. He had found them the apartment and promised to help them find work. Tamás and Április were old enough to make the border crossing on foot; Christmas Eve would provide the aperture. So at last they decided to take the risk. They had written the news, in carefully veiled language, to József and Elisabet and Paul. And now, on the other side of the ocean, Elisabet was beginning to prepare the apartment, furnishing the rooms and laying in everything they would need. Andras had resisted thinking about the flat itself; such detailed imagining of their future lives seemed to invite bad luck. But he and Klara told the children about the junior high and high schools they would attend, the movie theaters with their pink neon-lit towers, the stores with great bins of fruit from all over the world. Elisabet had been writing to them about those things for years; by now they had attained the quality of images from a legend.

Even more fantastical to Andras was the prospect of returning to school himself, the prospect of finishing his degree in architecture. He and Polaner had made a pact to do it, and Mátyás had agreed to join them. For the past eleven years, exhausted by their daily work, Andras and Polaner had struggled to retain what they’d learned at the École Spéciale. They had set each other exercises, had challenged each other to solve problems of design. They had even attended a few night classes, but had been so dispirited by the dullness of Soviet architecture that they had found themselves unwilling to continue. New York presented a different prospect. They knew nothing of the schools there, but József had written that the city was full of them. He and Polaner had sworn their pact over glasses of Tokaji on the evening of Polaner’s departure.

“We’ll be old men among boys,” Andras had said. “I can see us now.”

“We’re not old,” Polaner said. “We’re not even forty.”

“Don’t you remember what it was like? I don’t know if I have the stamina.”

“What’s going to happen?” Polaner said. “Are you going to get a nosebleed?”

“Without a doubt. And that’ll be just the beginning.”

“Here’s to the beginning,” Polaner said, and two hours later he had disappeared into the uncertain night, carrying only his knapsack and a green metal tube of drawings.

Now, on this clear December morning, Klara stood beside Andras at the window, following his gaze toward the park and the river. After the war she had left off teaching and had turned her attention to choreography. The Soviets loved that she had been trained by a Russian and spoke the language; never mind that her teacher had been a White Russian who had fled Petersburg in 1917. The Hungarian National Ballet gave her a permanent position, and the state newspaper praised the strength and angularity of her work. K. Lévi is a choreographer in the true Soviet style, the official dance critic wrote; and Klara, who for years had been plotting her family’s defection to the United States, sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper in her hand and laughed.

“Time to go,” she said now. “Mátyás will be waiting.”

Andras helped her into her gray coat and draped a cinnamon-colored scarf around her neck. “You’re as lovely as ever,” he said, touching her sleeve. “You used to wear a red hat in Paris. You’ll have one again in America.”

“As ever!” she said. “Has it come to that? Am I so old?”

“Ageless,” he said. “Timeless.”

They met Mátyás at the corner of Pozsonyi út and Szent István körút. In honor of the occasion he had worn a pink carnation in his buttonhole, a gesture that seemed to recall his younger self. He had returned from Siberia hardened and sharpened into a man, a fierce aggressive light radiating from his eyes. He had never returned to dancing, would never again wear a top hat, white tie, and tails. The part of him that had been inclined toward the physical expression of joy had been carved away in Siberia. But now, on the day of the name change, a pink carnation.

Klara pressed Andras’s arm as they crossed Perczel Mór utca. “I brought the camera,” she said. “I hope you’re feeling photogenic.”