Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Horthy couldn’t be troubled with the matter beyond forming the opinion that something ought to be done. He told the minister of culture to handle it as he saw fit. The minister of culture assigned the problem to an undersecretary who was known for his ambition and his unambiguous feelings toward Jews. This man, Madarász, lost no time in carrying out his assignment. First he forbade the visa office to grant exit passes to the two dancers. Then he assigned two police officers, known members of the right-wing Arrow Cross Party, to carry out a regular watch over the dancers’ comings and goings. Klara and Sándor never guessed that the policemen they saw every night in the alley had anything to do with the troubles they were having at the visa office; the men scarcely seemed to notice them. Usually the policemen were arguing. Invariably they were drunk: They had an army canteen they passed back and forth between them. No matter how late Klara and Sándor stayed at the Operaház-and sometimes they stayed until twelve thirty or one o’clock, because the theater was the only place where they could be alone-the men were always there. After a week or so of listening to their arguments, Sándor learned their names: Lajos was the tall block-jawed one; Gáspár was the one who looked like a bulldog. Sándor got into the habit of waving to them in greeting. The policemen never waved back, of course; they would give stony stares as Klara and Sándor passed.

A month went by and the men were still there, their presence as much a mystery as ever. But by that time they’d come to seem part of the neighborhood furniture, the fabric of Sándor and Klara’s everyday lives. The situation might have gone on indefinitely, or at least until the Ministry of Culture had lost interest, had not the policemen themselves tired of their endless watch. Boredom and drink made their silence oppressive. They started calling out to Klara and Sándor: Hey, lovers. Hey, darlings. How does she taste? Can we have some? Do dancer boys have anything down there? Does he know what to do with it, sugar? Sándor would take Klara’s arm and hurry her along, but she could feel him shaking with anger as the men’s taunts followed them down the street.

One night the man called Gáspár approached them, stinking of cigarettes and liquor. Klara remembered thinking that the leather strap across his chest looked like the kind of strap teachers used to beat unruly children at school. He drew his baton from its holster and tapped it against his leg.

“What are you waiting for?” the man called Lajos goaded him.

Gáspár took the baton and slipped it under the hem of Klara’s dress; in one swift motion he raised the hem as high as her head, exposing her to the waist for an instant.

“There you go,” called Gáspár to Lajos. “Now you’ve seen it.”

Before Klara knew what was happening, Sándor had stepped forward and grabbed the free end of the baton; as he tried to twist it away, the officer held fast to the other end. Sándor kicked the man in the knee, making him howl in pain. The officer wrenched the baton away and struck Sándor in the head. Sándor fell to his knees. He raised his arms, and the officer began to kick him in the stomach. For a moment Klara was caught in a paralysis of horror; she couldn’t understand what was happening or why. She screamed for the man to stop, she tried to pull him off Sándor. But the other officer, Lajos, caught her by the arm and wrenched her away. He dragged her into a recess of the alley, where he forced her down onto the paving stones and pushed her skirt up around her waist. He stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth, put a gun under her chin, and did what he did to her.

The pain of it had a kind of clarifying power. She scuttled her fingers across the pavement, looking for what she knew was there: the baton, cold and smooth against the cobblestones. He’d dropped it when he’d bent to unbutton his pants. Now she closed her hand around it and struck him in the temple. When he yelped and put a hand to his head, she kicked him in the chest as hard as she could. He reeled back against the opposite wall of the alcove, hit his head against the base of the wall, and went still. At that moment, from the alley where Sándor and the officer had been struggling, there came a sharp percussive crack. The sound seemed to fly into Klara’s brain and explode outward.

Then a terrible silence.

She got to her knees and crawled out of the alcove, toward the place where one male form crouched over another. Sándor lay on his back with his eyes open toward the sky. The bulldog-faced officer knelt beside him, one hand on Sándor’s chest. The officer was crying, telling the boy to get up, damn him, get up. He called the boy a rotten piece of filth. His hand came away from Sándor’s chest covered in blood. From the pavement he retrieved the gun he’d dropped and turned it upon Klara; its barrel caught the light and quavered in the dim cave of the alley. Klara edged back into the alcove where the first officer lay. She went to her knees, searching for the man’s revolver; she’d heard it clatter to the pavement when she’d knocked him away. There it was, cold and heavy on the ground. She picked it up in one hand and tried to hold it still against her leg. The officer who had shot Sándor advanced toward her, weeping. If she hadn’t seen him holding the gun a moment earlier, he might have seemed to be approaching her in supplication. Now she looked at Sándor on the ground and felt the weight of the weapon in her own hand, the same gun that the officer called Lajos had pushed against the hollow of her throat. She raised it and held it steady.

A second explosion. The man stumbled back and fell; afterward, a deep stillness.

It was the ache of the recoil in her shoulder that made her know that it had happened: She had fired the gun, had shot a man. From Andrássy út came a woman’s shout. Farther away, a siren sent up its two-note howl. She came out of the alcove with the gun in her hand and approached the officer she had shot. He had fallen backward onto the pavement, one arm flung over his head. From the alcove came a groan and a word she couldn’t understand. The other officer had gotten to his hands and knees. He saw the revolver in her hand and the man dead on the street. In three days he himself would be dead of his head injury, but not before he’d revealed the identity of his partner’s killer and his own. The distant sirens grew closer; Klara dropped the gun and ran.

She had killed one officer and fatally wounded another. Those were the facts. That she had been raped by one of those officers could never be proved in court. All the witnesses were dead, and within days Klara’s bruises and abrasions had disappeared. By that time, at the urging of her father’s lawyer, she’d been spirited over the border into Austria, and from there into Germany, and from Germany into France. The city of Paris would be her refuge, the famed ballet teacher Olga Nevitskaya, a cousin of Romankov’s, her protector. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. She would live at Nevitskaya’s only as long as it took her parents to determine who might be bribed, or how her safety might otherwise be guaranteed. But before two weeks had passed, the peril of Klara’s situation became clear. She had been accused of murder. The gravity of the crime assured that she would be tried as an adult. Her father’s lawyer believed there could be no guarantee of success in an argument of self-defense; the police had determined that the man she’d killed had been unarmed when she’d shot him. Of course he’d had a gun; he’d shot Sándor with it a few moments earlier. But the other officer, the one who had witnessed the shooting, had testified that his partner had dropped the gun before he had approached Klara. The testimony had been confirmed by material evidence: the gun had been found beside Sándor’s body, ten feet away from the fallen officer.