Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“What?” Andras said. He was proud of his shabby room.

“It’s exactly as I imagined,” Tibor said. “Down to the last detail.”

Under his gaze the Paris apartment seemed to come fully into Andras’s possession perhaps for the first time, as if his seeing it made it continuous with the places Andras had lived before, with the life he had led before he climbed onto a train at Nyugati Station in September. “Come in,” Andras said. “Take off your coat. Let me make a fire.”

Tibor took off his coat, but he wouldn’t let Andras make the fire. It couldn’t have mattered less that this was Andras’s apartment, nor that Tibor had been traveling for three days. This was how it had always been between them: The older took care of the younger. If this had been Mátyás’s apartment and Andras had been there to visit, Andras would have been the one cracking the kindling and piling the paper beneath the logs. In a few minutes Tibor had conjured a steady blaze. Only then would he take off his shoes and crawl into Andras’s bed.

“What a relief!” he said. “It’s been three days since I slept lying down.” He pulled the coverlet over himself and in another moment he was asleep.

Andras set up his books on the table and tried to study, but found he couldn’t concentrate. He wanted news of Mátyás and his parents. And he wanted news of Budapest -not of its politics or its problems, which anyone could read about in the Hungarian dailies, but of the neighborhood where they’d lived, the people they knew, the innumerable small changes that marked the flow of time. He wanted, too, to tell Tibor what had happened to Polaner, whom he’d seen again that morning. Polaner had looked even worse than before, swollen and livid and feverish. His breath had grated in his throat, and the nurses had bent over him with dressings for his bruises and doses of fluids to raise his blood pressure. A team of doctors gathered at the foot of his bed and debated the risks and benefits of surgery. The signs of internal bleeding persisted, but the doctors couldn’t agree whether it was best to operate or whether the bleeding would stop on its own. Andras tried to decode their quick medical patter, tried to piece through the puzzle of French anatomical terms, but he couldn’t grasp everything, and his fear prevented him from asking questions. It was horrible to think of Polaner cut open, and even worse to think of the bleeding unstinted inside him. Andras had stayed until Professor Vago arrived to take over the watch; he didn’t want Polaner to wake and find himself alone. Ben Yakov hadn’t made an appearance that morning, and no one had heard from Rosen since he’d left the hospital in search of Lemarque.

Now he forced himself to look at his textbook: a list of statics problems swarming in an antlike blur. He willed the numbers and letters into an intelligible order, penciled neat columns of figures onto a clean sheet of graph paper. He calculated the force vectors acting upon fifty steel rods in a load-bearing wall of reinforced concrete, located the points of highest tension along a cathedral buttress, estimated the wind sway of a hypothetical steel structure twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Each building with its quiet internal math, the numbers floating within the structures. An hour passed as he made his way through the list of problems. At last Tibor groaned and sat up in bed.

“Orrh,” he said. “Am I still in Paris?”

“I’m afraid so,” Andras said.

Tibor insisted on taking Andras to dinner. They went to a Basque restaurant that was supposed to serve good oxtail soup. The waiter was a broad-shouldered bully who banged the plates onto the tables and shouted curses at the kitchen. The soup was thin, the meat overcooked, but they drank Basque beer that made Andras feel flushed and sentimental. Here was his brother at last, here they were together, dining in a foreign city like the grown men they’d become. Their mother would have laughed aloud to see them together in this mannish restaurant, leaning over their mugs of ale.

“Be honest,” Andras said. “How’s Anya? Her letters are too cheerful. I’m afraid she wouldn’t tell me if something were wrong.”

“I went to Konyár the weekend before I left,” Tibor said. “Mátyás was there, too. Anya’s trying to convince Apa to move to Debrecen for the winter. She wants him close to a good doctor if he gets pneumonia again. He won’t go, of course. He insists he won’t get sick, as though he had any control over that. And when I take Anya’s side, he asks me who I think I am to tell him what to do. You’re not a doctor yet, Tibi, he says. And he shakes his finger at me.”

Andras laughed, though he knew it was a serious matter; they both knew how ill their father had been, and how their mother relied on him. “What will they do?”

“Stay in Konyár, for now.”

“And Mátyás?”

Tibor shook his head. “A strange thing happened the night before I left. Matyás and I went walking out to the rail bridge above that creek, the one where we used to catch minnows in the summer.”

“I know the one,” Andras said.

“It was a cold night to be out walking. The bridge was icy. We never should have been up there in the first place. Well, we stood there for a while looking at the stars, and we started talking about Anya and Apa, about what Mátyás might have to do if something happened to them, and he was angry at me, you know-I was leaving him to handle everything alone, he said. I tried to tell him they’d be fine, and that if anything truly bad happened, you and I would come home, and he said we’d never come home, that you were gone for good and that I would be soon. We were having this argument above that frozen creek, and then we heard a train coming.”

“I don’t know if I want to hear the end of this.”

“So Mátyás says, ‘Stay on the bridge. Stand here beside the tracks, on the crossties. See if we can keep our balance when the train comes by. Think you can? Not scared, are you?’ The train’s coming fast now. And you know that bridge, Andras. The ties give you about a meter on each side of the tracks. And it’s maybe twenty meters above the creek. So he jumps onto the ties between the rails and stands there facing the train. It’s coming on. The light from the headlamp’s already on him. I’m shouting at him to get off, but he’s not going anywhere. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he says. ‘Let it come.’ So I run at him and put him over my shoulder like a sack of sawdust, and I swear to God, the bridge was iced so badly I nearly fell and killed us both. I got him off and threw him in the snow. The train came by about a second later. He stood up laughing like a madman afterward, and I got up and hit him across the jaw. I wanted to break his neck, the little idiot.”

“I would have broken his neck!”

“Believe me, I wanted to.”

“He didn’t want you to go. He’s all alone there now.”

“Not exactly,” Tibor said. “He’s got quite a life in Debrecen. Nothing like our school days. He and I made it up the next day, and I went back there with him on the way to Budapest. You should see what he’s been doing at that nightclub where he performs! He ought to be in movies. He’s like Fred Astaire, but with back handsprings and somersaults. And they pay him to do it! I might be happy for him if I didn’t think he’s completely lost his mind. He’s inches from being kicked out of school, you know. He’s failing Latin and history and barely sliding by in his other classes. I’m sure he’ll quit as soon as he saves enough for a ticket out of Hungary. Anya and Apa know it, too.”

“You didn’t tell them about that bridge business, did you?”

“Are you joking?”

They signaled to the waiter for another round of drinks. While they waited, Andras asked about Budapest and their old Harsfa utca and the Jewish Quarter.