Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Kálozi wants you in the office,” he growled.

“Right away, Lieutenant, sir,” Mendel said, and dared to wink at Andras.

Grimasz caught the tone, the wink. He raised his hand to cuff Mendel, but Mendel ducked the blow. The men gave a muffled cheer. Grimasz grabbed Mendel by the collar and half shoved, half dragged him to the office, while Andras followed at a run.

Major János Kálozi wasn’t a cruel man, but he was ambitious. The son of a Gypsy woman and an itinerant knife-grinder, he’d been promoted through the Munkaszolgálat himself, hoping for a transfer to the gun-carrying branch of the military. He’d been given his present assignment because he had actual knowledge of forestry; he had worked the forests of Transylvania before he’d emigrated to Hungary in the twenties. Andras had never before been called to his office, which was located in the only barracks building that had a porch and its own outhouse. Kálozi had, of course, appropriated the room with the largest window. This had proved to be a mistake. The window, a many-paned affair gleaned from the south-facing wall of a burned farmhouse, smelled of carbon and welcomed the cold. Kálozi had been obliged to cover it with army blankets of the same kind touted in the Fashion Column, rendering the office dark as a cellar. Beneath the smell of carbon was a distinct odor of horse; before the blankets had been put to their current use, they had been stored in a stable. Kálozi sat in the midst of this pungent gloom behind a massive metal desk. A coal brazier kept the place just warm enough to suggest that warm rooms existed and that this was not one of them.

Andras and Mendel stood at attention while Kálozi glanced through a near-complete set of The Snow Goose, beginning in December 1940 and ending with this week’s edition, dated March 7, 1941. Only the disintegrated inaugural issue was lacking. The major had grown visibly older in the time he’d directed the 112/30th. The hair at his temples had gone gray and his broad nose had become cobwebbed with tiny red veins. He looked up at Andras and Mendel with the air of a weary school principal.

“Fun and games,” he said, removing his glasses. “Please explain, Squad Captain Lévi. Or shall I call you Parisi?”

“It was my doing, sir,” Mendel said. He held his Munkaszolgálat cap in his hands, his thumb working over the brass button at its forward-tilted peak. “I wrote the first issue and asked the squad captain to illustrate it. And we went on from there.”

“You did indeed,” Kálozi said. “You gained access to the mimeograph machine and printed dozens of copies.”

“As squad captain I accept full responsibility,” Andras said.

“I’m afraid I can’t give you all the credit, Parisi. Our man Horovitz is so very talented, we can’t let his efforts go unrecognized.” Kálozi turned to an article he’d bookmarked with a bitten pencil. “Change of Leadership at Erdei Camp,” he read aloud. “The veteran potentate Commander Jánika Kálozi the Cross-Eyed, at the behest of Regent Miklós Horthy himself, was deposed from his military appointment this week due to gross ineptitude and disgraceful behavior. In a ceremony at the parade ground he was replaced by a leader deemed more worthy, a male baboon by the name of Rosy Buttocks. The commander was escorted from the parade ground amid a deafening chorus of flatulence and applause.” He turned the newspaper around to reveal Andras’s drawing of the major, cross-eyed, in full uniform on top and ladies’ underdrawers beneath, mincing on high heels beside his first lieutenant, an unmistakably boar-headed man, while in the background a florid-assed monkey saluted the assembled work servicemen.

Andras fought to suppress a grin. He was particularly fond of that drawing.

“What are you laughing at, Squad Captain?”

“Nothing, sir,” Andras said. He’d known Kálozi for a year and a half now, and understood that he was soft at heart; in fact, he seemed to take a certain pride in his own reluctance to mete out harsh punishment. Andras had hoped Kálozi wouldn’t come across that particular issue of The Snow Goose, but he hadn’t felt any particular trepidation when he’d drawn the picture.

“I don’t mind a laugh now and then,” Kálozi said, “but I can’t have the men ridiculing me. This company will fall into chaos.”

“I understand, sir,” Andras said. “We meant no harm.”

“What do you know of harm?” Kálozi said, rising from his chair. A vein had begun to pump at his temple; for the first time since they’d entered the office, Andras felt a stirring of fear. “When I served in the Great War, an officer might have flayed a man who drew something like this.”

“You’ve always been kind to us,” Andras said.

“That’s right. I’ve coddled you flea-bitten Jews. I’ve kept you clothed and fed and I’ve let you loll in bed on cold days and driven you half as hard as I should have. And in return you produce this filth and spread it through the company.”

“Just for laughs, sir,” Mendel said.

“Not any longer. Not at my expense.”

Andras pressed his unsteady teeth with his tongue. The pain radiated deep into his gums, and he fought an urge to turn and flee. But he drew himself up to his full height and met Kálozi’s eye “I offer my sincere apologies,” he said.

“Why apologize?” Kálozi said. “In one sense you’ve done the Munkaszolgálat a great favor. It seems some people have been spreading lies about the gross mistreatment of work servicemen in our national armed forces. A rag like this will be a powerful piece of counterevidence.” He rolled a copy of The Snow Goose into a stiff tube. “The work service encourages fellowship and humor, et cetera. Conditions are so humane that you men are free to joke and laugh and make light of your situation. You’ve even had typewriters, drawing supplies, and mimeograph machines at your disposal. Free speech. It’s practically French.” He grinned, because they all knew what had become of free speech in France.

“But there is something I want from you,” Kálozi went on. “I think you’ll consider it fair, given the situation. Since you’ve humiliated me publicly, I think it’s fitting that you be punished publicly in return.”

Andras swallowed. At his side, Mendel had gone pale. They had both heard rumors of what went on in other labor-service companies, and neither was so naïve as to think those things couldn’t happen in the 112/30th. Most horrifying was the case of the brother of one of their own workmates, who had been a member of the Debrecen labor battalion. As a punishment for stealing a loaf of bread from the officers’ pantry, the man had been stripped naked and buried to his knees in mud; he’d been made to stand there for three days as the weather got progressively colder, until, on the third night, he’d died of exposure.

“I’m speaking to you, Squad Captain Lévi,” Kálozi said. “Look at me. Don’t hang your head like a dog.”

Andras raised his eyes to Kálozi’s. The major didn’t blink. “I’ve thought long and hard about an appropriate punishment,” he said. “As it happens, I’m rather fond of you boys. You’ve both been good workers. But you’ve shamed me. You’ve shamed me in front of my men. And so, Lévi and Horovitz”-here Kálozi paused for effect, tapping his rolled-up copy of The Snow Goose against the desk-“I’m afraid you will have to eat your words.”

That was how Andras and Mendel came to find themselves stripped to their underclothes, their hands manacled behind their backs, kneeling before the assembled 112/30th at six o’clock on a cold March morning. Ten issues of The Snow Goose lay on a bench before them. While the labor servicemen watched, Lieutenant Grimasz tore off strips of the newspaper, crumpled them up, dunked them in water, and stuffed them into the mouths of co-publishers Lévi and Horovitz. Over a period of two hours they were each forced to eat twenty pages of The Snow Goose. As Andras clenched his teeth against Grimasz’s prodding hands, he began to understand for the first time what a comfortable and protected life he had led, relatively speaking, in the Munkaszolgálat. He had never before had his hands bound behind his back, or been forced to kneel coatless and pant-less in the snow for hours on end; he had, in fact, been fed and clothed and housed, his miseries eased by the knowledge that all the men of Company 112/30 were suffering similar miseries. Now he became aware of a new kind of hell, one he could scarcely allow himself to imagine. He knew that what was happening here, on the grand continuum of punishment, might still be classed as relatively humane; far off down that tunnel existed punishments that could make a man long for death. He forced himself to chew and swallow, chew and swallow, telling himself it was the only way to get through the hideous thing that was happening to him. Somewhere after the fifteenth page he tasted blood in his mouth and spat out a molar. His gums, spongy with scurvy, had finally begun to give up their teeth. He screwed his eyes shut and ate paper and ate paper and ate paper until finally he lost consciousness, and then he collapsed into the cold wet shock of the snow.