Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

He sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. “This will be the death of me,” he said. “Thinking of you living in Budapest, outside the law.”

“I was living outside the law in Paris.”

“But the law was so much farther away!”

“I won’t leave you here in Hungary,” she said. “That’s all.”

He had never dared to imagine that he and Klara might be married at the Dohány Street Synagogue, nor that his parents and Mátyás might be there to witness it; he had certainly never dreamed that Klara’s family might be there, too-her mother, who had shed her widow’s garb for a column of rose-colored silk, weeping with joy; the younger Mrs. Hász tight-lipped and erect in a drooping Vionnet gown; Klara’s brother, György, his affection for Klara having overcome whatever reservations he might have had about Andras, striding about with as much bluster and anxiety as if he were the bride’s father; and József Hász, watching the proceedings with silent detachment. Their wedding canopy was Lucky Béla’s prayer shawl, and Klara’s wedding ring the simple gold band that had belonged to Béla’s mother. They were married on an October afternoon in the synagogue courtyard. A grand ceremony in the sanctuary was out of the question. There could be nothing public about their union except the paperwork that would place the bride’s name at a still-farther remove from the Klara Hász she had once been. She couldn’t become a citizen, thanks to a new anti-Jewish law that had been passed in May, but she could still legally change her surname to Andras’s, and apply for a residence permit under that veil. Andras’s father himself read the marriage contract aloud, his rabbinical-school training in Aramaic having prepared him for the role. And Andras’s mother, shy before the few assembled guests, presented the glass to be broken under Andras’s foot.

What no one mentioned-not during the wedding itself, nor during the luncheon at Benczúr utca that followed-was Andras’s imminent departure for Carpatho-Ruthenia. But the awareness of it ran underneath every event of the day like an elegy. József, it turned out, had been saved from a similar fate; the Hász family had managed to secure his exemption from labor service by bribing a government official. The exemption had come at a price proportionate to the Hászes’ wealth: They had been forced to give the government official their chalet on Lake Balaton, where Klara had spent her childhood summers. József’s student visa had been renewed and he would return to France as soon as the borders opened, though no one knew when that might be, nor whether France would admit citizens of countries allied with Germany. Andras’s parents were in no position to buy him an exemption. The lumberyard barely supplied their existence. Klara had suggested that her brother might help, but Andras refused to discuss the possibility. There was the danger, first of all, of alerting the government authorities to the link between Andras and the Hász family; nor did Andras want to be a financial burden to György. In desperation, Klara suggested selling her apartment and studio in Paris, but Andras wouldn’t let her consider that either. The apartment on the rue de Sévigné was her home. If her situation in Hungary became more precarious, she would have to return there at once by whatever means possible. And there was a less practical element to the decision too: As long as Klara owned the apartment and studio, they could imagine themselves back in Paris someday. Andras would endure his two years in the work service; by then, as Klara had said, the war might be over, and they could return to France.

For a few sweet hours, during the wedding festivities on Benczúr utca, Andras found it possible almost to forget about his impending departure. In a large gallery that had been cleared of furniture, he was lifted on a chair beside his new bride while a pair of musicians played Gypsy music. Afterward, he and Mátyás and their father danced together, holding each other by the arms and spinning until they stumbled. József Hász, who could not resist the role of host even at a wedding of which he seemed to disapprove, kept everyone’s champagne glasses full. And Mátyás, in the tradition of making the bride and groom laugh, performed a Chaplinesque tap dance that involved a collapsing cane and a top hat that kept leaping away. Klara cried with laughter. Her pale forehead had flushed pink, and dark curls sprang from her chignon. But it was impossible for Andras to forget entirely that all of this was fleeting, that soon he would have to kiss his new bride goodbye and board a train for Carpatho-Ruthenia. Nor would his joy have been uncomplicated in any case. He couldn’t ignore the younger Mrs. Hász’s coldness, nor the reminders on all sides of how different Klara’s early life had been from his own. His mother, elegant as she was in her gray gown, seemed afraid to handle the delicate Hász champagne flutes; his father had little to say to Klara’s brother, and even less to say to József. If Tibor had been there, Andras thought, he might have found a way to bridge the divide. But Tibor was absent, of course, as were three others, the lack of whom made the day’s events seem somehow unreal: Polaner and Rosen, who had nonetheless sent telegrams of congratulations, and Ben Yakov, from whom there had been continued silence. He knew Klara was experiencing her own private pain in the midst of her happiness: She must have been thinking of her father, and of Elisabet, thousands of miles away.

The war was discussed, and Hungary ’s possible role in it. Now that Poland had fallen, György Hász said, England and France might pressure Germany into a cease-fire before Hungary could be forced to come to the aid of its ally. It seemed to Andras a far-fetched idea, but the day demanded an optimistic view. It was mid-October, one of the last warm afternoons of the year. The plane trees were filled with slanting light, and a gold haze pooled in the garden like a flood of honey. As the sun slipped toward the edge of the garden wall, Klara took Andras’s hand and led him outside. She brought him to a corner of the garden behind a privet hedge, where a marble bench stood beneath a fall of ivy. He sat down and took her onto his lap. The skin of her neck was warm and damp, the scent of roses mingled with the faint mineral tang of her sweat. She inclined her face to his, and when he kissed her she tasted of wedding cake.

That was the moment that came back to him again and again, those nights in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. That moment, and the ones that came afterward in their suite at the Gellért Hotel. Their honeymoon had been a brief one: three days, that was all. Now it sustained him like bread: the moment they’d registered at the hotel as husband and wife; the look of relief she’d given him when they were alone in the room together at last; her surprising shyness in their bridal bed; the curve of her naked back in the tangled sheets when they woke in the morning; the wedding ring a surprising new weight on his hand. It seemed an incongruous luxury to wear the ring now as he worked, not just because of the contrast of the gold with the dirt and grayness of everything around him, but because it seemed part of their intimacy, sweetly private. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li, she had said in Hebrew when she’d given it to him, a line from the Song of Songs: I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. He was hers and she was his, even here in Carpatho-Ruthenia.

He and his workmates lived on an abandoned farm in an abandoned hamlet near a stone quarry that had long since given up all the granite anyone cared to take from it. He didn’t know how long ago the farm had been deserted by its inhabitants; the barn held only the faintest ghost odor of animals. Fifty men slept in the barn, twenty in a converted chicken house, thirty in the stables, and fifty more in a newly constructed barracks. The platoon captains and the company commander and the doctor and the work foremen slept in the farmhouse, where they had real beds and indoor plumbing. In the barn, each man had a metal cot and a bare mattress stuffed with hay. At the foot of each cot was a wooden kit box stamped with its owner’s identification number. The food was meager but steady: coffee and bread in the morning, potato soup or beans at noon, more soup and more bread at night. They had clothing enough to keep them warm: overcoats and winter uniforms, woolen underthings, woolen socks, stiff black boots. Their overcoats, shirts, and trousers were nearly identical to the uniforms worn by the rest of the Hungarian Army. The only difference was the green M sewn onto their lapels, for Munkaszolgálat, the labor service. No one ever said Munkaszolgálat, though; they called it Musz, a single resentful syllable. In the Musz, his company-mates told him, you were just like any other member of the military; the difference was that your life was worth even less than shit. In the Musz, they said, you got paid the same as any other enlisted man: just enough for your family to starve on. The Musz wasn’t bent on killing you, just on using you until you wanted to kill yourself. And of course there was the other difference: Everyone in his labor-service company was Jewish. The Hungarian Ministry of Defense considered it dangerous to let Jews bear arms. The military classified them as unreliable, and sent them to cut trees, to build roads and bridges, to erect army barracks for the troops who would be stationed in Ruthenia.