Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

Ben Yakov, mentally exhausted by the events of the previous year, had taken a leave of absence from school and decamped to his parents’ home in Rouen. The news came not from him but from Rosen, who predicted that Ben Yakov would soon try to contact Andras himself. Sure enough, enclosed in the same packet of letters was a telegram sent to Klara’s address in Budapest: ANDRAS: NO HARD FEELINGS BETWEEN US. DESPITE ALL, EVER YOUR FRIEND. GOD KEEP YOU SAFE. BEN YAKOV.

Klara herself wrote weekly. Her official residence permit had arrived without event; as far as the government was concerned she was Claire Lévi, the French-born wife of a Hungarian labor serviceman. She had rented her apartment on the rue de Sévigné to a Polish composer who had fled to Paris; the composer knew a ballet teacher who would be glad to have a new studio, so the practice space was rented too. Klara was living now in an apartment on Király utca and had found a studio, as she’d hoped. She had taken on a few private students, and might soon begin to teach small classes. She was living a life of quiet seclusion, seeing her mother daily, walking in the park with her brother on Sunday afternoons; they had gone together to visit the grave of her teacher Viktor Romankov, who had died of a stroke after twenty years of teaching at the Royal Ballet School. Budapest was cobwebbed with memories, she wrote. Sometimes she forgot entirely that she was a grown woman; she would find herself wandering toward the house on Benczúr utca, expecting to find her father still alive, her brother a tall young gimnázium student, her girlhood room intact. At times she was melancholy, and most of all she missed Andras. But he must not fear for her. She was well. All seemed safe.

He worried still, of course, but it was a comfort to hear from her-to hear at least that she felt safe, or safe enough to tell him so. He always kept her most recent letter in his overcoat pocket. When a new one came, he would move the old one to his kit box and add it to the sheaf he kept tied with her green hair-ribbon. He had their wedding photograph in a marbled folder from Pomeranz and Sons. He counted the days before his furlough, counted and counted, through what seemed the longest winter of his life.

In spring the forest filled with the scent of black earth and the dawn-to-dusk cacophony of birdsong. Overnight, new curtains appeared in the windows of the empty houses along the way to the work site. There were children in the fields, bicyclists on the roads, the smell of grilled sausage from the roadside inns. The promised furlough had been postponed until the end of summer; there was too much work, their commander told them, to allow any of their company a break. Thank God the winter’s over, his mother wrote. Every day I worried. My Andráska in those mountains, in that terrible cold. I know you are strong, but a mother imagines the worst. Now I can imagine something better: You are warm, your work is easier, and before long you will be home. In the same circlet of foothills where Andras and his workmates had suffered endless months of labor, Hungarians now gathered to take the air and eat berries with fresh cream and swim in the freezing lakes. But for the labor servicemen, the work went on. Now that the ground had thawed and softened, now that the trees in the path of the road had been cleared, Labor Company 112/30 had to uproot the giant stumps so the roadbed might be leveled, the gravel spread for the road. The summer months appeared on the horizon with their promise of hot days amid asphalt and tar. The solstice came and went. It seemed nothing would ever change. Then, in early July, another packet of letters came from Klara, and with it news of Tibor and of France.

Tibor and Ilana had been married in May, after a long engagement and a period of reconciliation with her parents. A certain Rabbi di Samuele had interceded on behalf of the couple. He had proved such a good intermediary that Ilana’s mother and father had at last invited Tibor to Shabbos dinner. Even so, Tibor wrote, I thought her father would punch me in the eye. I was the villain, you see, not Ben Yakov; I was the man who had accompanied their daughter on the train. Every time I ventured a comment on a point of biblical interpretation, her father laughed as if my ignorance delighted him. Ilana’s mother deliberately neglected to pass me food. Halfway through the meal, the Holy One made a risky intervention: Ilana’s father fell out of his chair, half dead of a heart attack. I kept him alive with chest compressions until a real doctor was called in. In the end he survived; I was the hero of the evening; Signor and Signora di Sabato changed their views. Ilana and I were married within the month. We returned to Hungary when my visa expired and have been living here in Budapest, not far from your own lovely bride, doing what we can to keep her company and to get my papers in order for a return to Italy. I have brought my Ilana to meet Anya and Apa. They loved her, she loved them, and our father became tipsy and encouraged us at the end of the evening to go make grandchildren. As for our younger brother, he continues to run wild. This month he makes his debut at the Pineapple Club, where people will pay good money to see him tap-dance atop a white piano. Somehow he has also managed to pass his baccalaureate exams. He is still arranging shop windows and has more clients than he can serve. His girlfriend, however, has deserted him for a scoundrel. He sends his regards and the enclosed photo. The photo showed Mátyás in top hat, white tie, and tails, a cane in his hand, one foot cocked over the other to flash a glint of tap metal at the sole.

My thoughts are with you always, Tibor wrote. I hope you will never have use for the medical supplies I’m sending with this letter, but just in case, I have made an attempt to assemble a field hospital in miniature. Meanwhile I remain, in continual fear for your safety and belief in your fortitude, your loving brother, TIBOR.

The next letter was from Mátyás, dated May 29 and written in an angry scrawl. I’ve been called up, he informed Andras. The stinking bastards. They’ll never make me work for them. Horthy says he will protect the Jews. Liar! My gimnázium friend Gyula Kohn died in the labor service last month. He had a pain in his side and a fever but they sent him to work anyway. It was appendicitis. He died three days later. He was my age, nineteen.

The final letter was from Klara herself, with a newspaper clipping that showed the German Eighteenth Army marching through the streets of Paris, and an enormous Nazi flag hanging from the Hotel de Ville. Andras sat on his cot and stared at the photographs. He thought of his first brief passage through Germany what seemed a geologic age ago-his stopover in Stuttgart, when he’d tried to buy bread at a bakery that did not serve Jews. That was where he’d seen the red flag hanging from the façade of the train station, a blast of National Socialist fervor five stories high. He refused to believe what the attached article told him: that the same flag now flew from every official building in Paris; that Paul Reynaud, successor to Daladier, had resigned; that the new premier, Philippe Pétain, had declared that France would collaborate with Hitler in the formation of a New Europe. Even Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité had been replaced with a new slogan: Travail, Famille, Patrie. There was a rumor that all Jews who had volunteered for the French Army would be removed from their battalions and imprisoned in concentration camps, from which they would be deported to the East.

Polaner. He said it aloud into the damp hay-smelling air of the bunk. His eyes burned. Here he was, thousands of miles away, and helpless; there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do. Already Hitler had what he wanted of Poland. He had Luxembourg and Belgium and the Netherlands, he had Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, he had Italy as a member of the Tripartite Pact; he had Hungary as an ally, and now he had France. He would win the war, and what would happen to the Jews of the conquered nations? Would he force them to emigrate, deport them to marshlands at the center of ravaged Poland? It was impossible to conceive of what might happen.