Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Let’s hope it runs in the family,” Tibor said. His gaze had drifted toward the front of the line, where a slight, dark-haired woman had opened a wallet to count out notes. Andras felt a pang: She wore her hair the way Klara did, in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. Her summer coat was cut like Klara’s, her posture elegant and erect. How cruel of fate, he thought, to place a vision of her before him at that moment.

And then, as she turned to replace the wallet in her valise, it seemed his heart would stop: It was her. She met his eyes with her gray eyes and raised a hand to show him a ticket: She was going with him. Nothing he could say would keep her from it.

IN JANUARY OF 1940, Labor Service Company 112/30 of the Hungarian Army was stationed in Carpatho-Ruthenia, somewhere between the towns of Jalová and Stakčin, not far from the Cirocha River. This was the territory Hungary had annexed from Czechoslovakia after Germany had taken back the Sudetenland. It was a craggy wild landscape of scrub-covered peaks and wooded hillsides, snow-filled valleys, frozen rock-choked streams. When Andras had read about the annexation of Ruthenia in the Paris newspapers or seen newsreel footage of its forested hills, the land had been nothing more than an abstraction to him, a pawn in a game of Hitlerian chess. Now he was living under the canopy of a Carpatho-Ruthenian forest, working as a member of a Hungarian Labor Service road-construction crew. After his return to Budapest, all hope of having his visa renewed had quickly evaporated. The clerk at the visa office, his breath reeking of onions and peppers, had met Andras’a request with laughter, pointing out that Andras was both a Jew and of military age; his chances of being granted a second two-year visa were comparable to the chances that he, Márkus Kovács, would spend his next holiday in Corfu with Lily Pons, ha ha ha. The man’s superior, a more sober-minded but equally malodorous man-cigars, sausages, sweat-scrutinized the letter from the École Spéciale and declared, with a patriotic side-glance at the Hungarian flag, that he did not speak French. When Andras translated the letter for him, the superior proclaimed that if the school was so fond of him now, it would still want him after he’d finished his two years of military service. Andras had persisted, going to the office day after day with increasing frustration and urgency. August was coming to an end. They had to get back to Paris. Klara’s situation was perilous and could only become more so the longer they stayed. Then, in the first week of September, Europe went to war.

On the flimsiest of pretexts-SS men dressed as Polish soldiers had faked an attack on a German radio station in the border town of Gleiwitz-Hitler sent a million and a half troops and two thousand tanks across the Polish border. The Budapest daily carried photographs of Polish horsemen riding with swords and lances against German panzer divisions. The next day’s paper showed a battlefield littered with dismembered horses and the remnants of ancient armor; grinning panzer troops clutched the greaves and breastplates to their chests. The paper reported that the armor would be displayed in a new Museum of Conquest that was under construction in Berlin. A few weeks later, as Germany and Russia negotiated the division of the conquered territory, Andras received his labor-service call-up. It would be another eighteen months before Hungary entered the war, but the draft of Jewish men had begun in July. Andras reported to the battalion offices on Soroksári út, where he learned that his company, the 112/30th, would be deployed to Ruthenia. He was to depart in three weeks’ time.

He brought the news to Mátyás at the lingerie shop on Váci utca where he was arranging a new display window. A group of correctly dressed middle-aged ladies watched from the sidewalk as Mátyás draped a line of dress forms with a series of progressively smaller underthings, a chaste burlesque captured in time. When Andras rapped on the glass, Mátyás raised a finger to signal his brother to wait; he finished pinning the back of a lilac slip, then disappeared through an elf-sized door in the display window. A moment later he appeared at the human-sized door of the shop, a tape measure slung over his shoulders, his lapel laddered with pins. Over the past two years he had changed from a rawboned boy into a slim, compact youth; he moved through the mundane ballet of his day with a dancer’s unselfconscious grace. At his jawline a perpetual shadow of stubble had emerged, and at his throat the neat small box of an Adam’s apple. He had their mother’s heavy dark hair and high sharp cheekbones.

“I’ve got a couple more wire girls to dress,” he said. “Why don’t you join me? You can give me the news while I’m pinning.”

They went into the shop and entered the display window through the elf-sized door. “What do you think?” Mátyás said, turning to a narrowwaisted dress form. “The pink chemise or the blue?” It was his practice to trim his windows during business hours; he found it drew a steady stream of customers demanding to buy the very things he was installing.

“The blue,” Andras said, and then, “Can you guess where I’ll be in three weeks?”

“Not Paris, I’d imagine.”

“ Ruthenia, with my labor company.”

Mátyás shook his head. “If I were you, I’d run right now. Hop a train back to Paris and beg political asylum. Say you refuse to go into service for a country that takes gifts of land from the Nazis.” He sank a pin into the strap of the blue chemise.

“I can’t become a fugitive. I’m engaged to be married. And the French borders are closed now, anyway.”

“Then go somewhere else. Belgium. Switzerland. You said yourself that Klara’s not safe here. Take her with you.”

“Ride the rails like vagrants, both of us?”

“Why not? It’s a lot better than being shipped off to Ruthenia.” But then he straightened from his work and regarded Andras for a long moment, his expression darkening. “You’ve really got to go, don’t you.”

“I can’t see any way around it. The first deployment’s only six months.”

“And then you’ll have a stingy furlough, and then you’ll be sent back for another six months. And then you’ll have to do that twice more.” Mátyás crossed his arms. “I still think you should run.”

“I wish I could, believe me.”

“Klara’s not going to be too happy about any of this.”

“I know. I’m on my way to see her now. She’s expecting me at her mother’s.”

Mátyás cuffed him on the shoulder for luck and held the little door open so he could slip through. He stepped down into the shop and went out through the bigger doors, waving to Mátyás through the glass as he made his way past the women who had gathered to watch. He could scarcely believe it was nearing October and he wasn’t on his way back to school; in recent days he’d found himself combing the Pesti Napló obsessively for news of Paris. Today’s papers had shown a crush at the railway stations as sixteen thousand children were evacuated to the countryside. If he and Klara had remained in France, perhaps they would have left the city too; or perhaps they would have chosen to stay, bracing themselves for whatever was to come. Instead here he was in Budapest, walking along Andrássy út toward the Városliget, toward the tree-shadowed avenues of Klara’s childhood. It had come to seem almost ordinary now to spend an afternoon at the house on Benczúr utca, though only a month had passed since they had first arrived in Budapest. At that time they’d been so uncertain about Klara’s situation that they’d been afraid even to go to the house; they’d taken a room under Andras’s name at a tiny out-of-the-way hotel on Cukor utca, and decided that the best course of action would be to warn Klara’s mother of her fugitive daughter’s presence in Budapest before Klara herself appeared at the house. The next afternoon he’d gone to Benczúr utca and presented himself to the housemaid as a friend of József’s. She had shown him into the same pink-and-gold-upholstered sitting room where he’d passed an uncomfortable hour on the day of his departure for Paris. The younger and elder Mrs. Hász were engaged in a card game at a gilt table by the window, and József was draped over a salmon-colored chair with a book in his lap. When he saw Andras in the doorway, József peeled himself from the chair and delivered the expected jovial greetings, the expected expressions of regret that Andras, too, had been forced to return to Budapest. The younger Mrs. Hász offered a polite nod, the elder a smile of welcome and recognition. But something about Andras’s look must have caught Klara’s mother’s attention, because a moment later she laid her fan of cards on the table and got to her feet.