Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

How stern I sound. You know I send my love. I’ve enclosed a letter from your mother.

APA

Dear Andráska,

Listen to your apa! And keep warm. You’ve always been prone to fevers in March. And send me the photograph of your Klara. You made a promise. I will hold you to it.

Love,

ANYA

Each letter with its payload of news and love, each with its reminder of his parents’ mortality. The fact that they had survived two more winters in Konyár without illness or injury hardly helped to assuage his worry; every winter would carry greater danger. He thought about them constantly as the bad news poured in, a deluge of it all spring. In late March the bloody horror of the Spanish Civil War drew to a close; the Republican army surrendered on the morning of the twenty-ninth, and Franco’s troops entered the capital. It was the beginning of the dictatorship foreseen by Hitler and Mussolini, he knew-the very reason they had poured their armaments and troops into the blast furnace of that war. He wondered if those two victories-the splintering of Czechoslovakia and the triumph of Franco in Spain-were what gave Hitler the courage to defy the American president in April. All the papers carried the story: On the fifteenth, Roosevelt had sent Hitler a telegram demanding assurance that Germany would not attack or invade any of a list of thirty-one independent states for at least ten years-including Poland, across which Hitler had proposed a highway and rail corridor to link Germany with East Prussia. After two weeks’ stalling, Hitler responded. In a speech at the Reichstag he denounced Germany’s naval accord with England, tore up the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, and ridiculed Roosevelt’s telegram in every detail. He finished by accusing Roosevelt of meddling in international affairs while he, Hitler, concerned himself only with the fate of his own small nation, which he had already rescued from the ignominy and ruin of 1919.

Debate raged in the halls of the École Spéciale. Rosen wasn’t the only one who believed that Europe was certain to go to war. Ben Yakov wasn’t the only one who argued that war might still be averted. Everyone had an opinion. Andras held with Rosen-he couldn’t see any other way out of the web into which Europe had fallen. As he and Polaner bent over their plans, he found himself thinking of his father’s stories of the Great War-the stench and the bloodshed of combat, the nightmare of planes that rained bullets and fire upon the foot soldiers, the confusion and hunger and filth of the trenches, the surprise of escaping with one’s own life. If there were a war, he would fight. Not for his own country; Hungary would fight alongside Germany, its ally, who had given it not only Ruthenia but also the Upper Province, which it had lost at Trianon. No: If there were a war, Andras would join the Foreign Legion and fight for France. He imagined appearing before Klara in the full glory of a dress uniform, a sword at his waist, the buttons of his coat polished to a painful sheen. She would beg him not to go to war, and he would insist that he must go-that he must protect the ideals of France, the city of Paris, and Klara herself within it.

But in May, two unexpected events served to blot out his awareness of the approaching conflict. The first was a tragedy: Ben Yakov’s bride lost the baby she’d been carrying for five months. It was Klara who went to tend her at Ben Yakov’s apartment, Klara who sent for the doctor when she found Ilana bleeding and wild with fever. At the hospital, in a long linoleum-tiled corridor decorated with lithographs of French doctors, Klara and Andras waited with Ben Yakov while a surgeon emptied Ilana’s womb. Ben Yakov sat in stunned silence, still wearing his pajama shirt. Andras knew he believed this to be his fault. He hadn’t wanted the child. He’d confessed it just a week earlier, late at night in the studio, as they sat working on a problem set for their statics class. “I’m not equal to it,” he’d said, laying his six-sided pencil on the lip of the desk. “I can’t be a father. I can’t support a child. There’s no money. And the world’s falling apart. What if I have to go off and fight a war?”

Andras had thought then of Klara’s womb, that sacred inward space they’d taken pains to keep empty. He’d had to force himself to make an empathetic reply. What he’d wanted to ask was why Ben Yakov had married Ilana di Sabato if he hadn’t wanted a child. Now the subject seemed to hover in the antiseptic air of the corridor: Ben Yakov had wished the child gone, and it was gone.

Outside the hospital windows, the eastern margin of the sky had turned blue with the coming morning. Klara was exhausted, Andras knew: Her spine, usually held so straight, had begun to droop with fatigue. He told her to go home, promised he’d come to see her after they talked to the doctor. He insisted: She had a class to teach that morning at nine. She protested, saying she was willing to stay as long as it took, but in the end he persuaded her to go home and sleep. She said goodbye to Ben Yakov, and he thanked her for having known what to do. They both watched her walk off down the hall, her shoes ticking out their quiet rhythm against the linoleum.

“She knows,” Ben Yakov said, once Klara had disappeared around the corner.

“Knows what?”

“She knows how I felt about the baby.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She would hardly look at me.”

“You’re imagining things,” Andras said. “I know she thinks well of you.”

“Well, she shouldn’t.” He pressed his fingers against his temples.

“It’s not your fault,” Andras said. “No one thinks it is.”

“What if I think it is?”

“It’s still not.”

“What if she thinks it is? Ilana, I mean?”

“It’s still not. And anyway, she won’t think so.”

After the doctor had finished, a pair of orderlies wheeled Ilana out on a gurney and brought her to a ward, where they transferred her to a hospital bed. Andras and Ben Yakov stood beside the bed and watched her sleep. Her skin was wax-white from the loss of blood, her dark hair pushed back from her forehead.

“I think I’m going to faint,” Ben Yakov said.

“You’d better sit down,” Andras said. “Do you want some water?”

“I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been sitting for hours.”

“Take a walk, then. Get some air.”

“I’m hardly dressed for it.”

“Go ahead. It’ll do you good.”

“All right. You’ll stay here with her?”

He promised he wouldn’t move.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Ben Yakov said. He tucked his pajama shirt into his trousers, then went off down the long avenue of beds. Just as he disappeared through the door of the ward, Ilana gave a rising cry of pain and shifted her hips beneath the sheet.

Andras glanced around for a nurse. Three beds away, a silver-haired woman in a crisp cap ministered to another deathly pale girl. “S’il vous plaît,” Andras called.

The nurse came to examine Ilana. She took her pulse and glanced at the chart at the end of the bed. “One moment,” she said, and ran down the ward; she returned a minute later with a syringe and a vial. Ilana opened her eyes and looked around in a daze of pain. She seemed to be searching for something. When her gaze fell upon Andras, her focus sharpened and her forehead relaxed. A faint flush came to her lips.

“It’s you,” she said in Italian. “You came all the way from Modena.”

“It’s Andras,” he told her. “You’re going to be all right.”

The nurse uncovered Ilana’s shoulder and swabbed it with alcohol. “I’m giving her morphine for the pain,” she said. “She’ll feel better in a moment.”

Ilana drew a sharp breath as the needle went in. “Tibor,” she said, turning her eyes again toward Andras. Then the morphine found its mark, and her eyelids fluttered and closed.