Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

He was dragged to the infirmary and placed in the care of the company’s only doctor, a man named Báruch Imber, whose sole purpose in life had become to save labor servicemen from the ravages of the labor service. Imber nursed Andras and Mendel for five days in the infirmary, and when they had recovered from hypothermia and forced paper consumption, he diagnosed them both with advanced scurvy and anemia and sent them home to Budapest for treatment in the military hospital, to be followed by a two-week furlough.

AFTER A WEEK-LONG train journey, during which their hair became infested with lice and their skin began to flake and bleed, they were transferred to an ambulance van that held sick and dying work servicemen. The floor of the van was lined with hay, but the men shivered in their coarse wool blankets. There were eight men in the van, most of whom were far worse off than Andras and Mendel. A man with tuberculosis had a massive tumor at his hip, another man had been blinded when a stove exploded, a third had a mouth full of abscesses. Andras put his head out the open back windows of the van as they entered Budapest. The sight of ordinary city life-of streetcars and pastry shops, boys and girls out for an evening, movie marquees with their clean black letters-filled him with unreasonable fury, as if it were all a mockery of his time in the Munkaszolgálat.

The van pulled up at the military hospital and the patients walked or were carried to a registration hall, where Andras and Mendel waited all night on a cold bench while hundreds of workers and soldiers had their names and numbers recorded in an official ledger. Sometime in the early morning, Mendel was inscribed in the hospital book and taken away to be bathed and treated. It was another two hours before they came to Andras, but at last, dazed with exhaustion, he found himself following a male nurse to a shower room, where the man stripped him of his filthy clothes, shaved his head, sprayed him with a burning disinfectant, and stood him in a torrent of hot water. The nurse washed his bruised skin all over with a kind of impersonal tenderness, a knowing forbearance for the failings of the human body. The man dried him and led him to a long ward heated by radiators that ran its entire length. Andras was shown to a narrow metal bed, and for the first time in a year and a half he slept on a real mattress, between real sheets. When he awoke after what seemed only a few moments, Klara was there at his bedside, her eyes red and raw. He pushed himself upright, took her hands, demanded the terrible news: Who had died? What new tragedy had befallen them?

“Andráska,” she said, in a voice fractured with pity; and he understood that he was the tragedy, that she was weeping over what remained of him. He didn’t know how much weight he’d lost in the work service, on that diet of coffee and soup and hard bread-only that he’d had to keep cinching the belt of his trousers tighter, and that his bones had become more prominent beneath the skin. His arms and legs were roped with the wiry muscles he’d built from the constant labor; even through the previous winter’s depression he’d never actually felt weak. But he saw how little his body disturbed the blanket that was pulled over him. He could only imagine how bony and strange he must look in his hospital pajamas, with his blood-blotched arms and his shaved head. He almost wished Klara had stayed away until he looked like a man again. He lowered his eyes and held his own elbows in what felt like self-protection. He watched her fold her hands in her lap; there was the gold glint of her wedding band. The ring was still smooth and reflective, her hands as white as they’d been when he’d last seen her. His own ring was scratched to dullness, his hands brown and cracked with work.

“The doctor’s been here,” Klara said. “He says you’ll be all right. But you’ve got to take vitamin C and iron and have a long rest.”

“I don’t need rest,” Andras said, determined that she should see him on his feet. He wasn’t wounded or crippled, after all. He swung his legs off the bed and planted his feet on the cool linoleum. But then a wave of dizziness hit him, and he put a hand to his head.

“You have to eat,” she said. “You’ve been asleep for twenty hours.”

“I have?”

“I’m to give you some vitamin tablets and some broth, and later some bread.”

“Oh, Klara,” he said, and lowered his head into his hands. “Just leave me alone here. I’m a horror.”

She sat down on the bed next to him and put her arms around him. Her smell was vaguely different-he detected a hint of lilac soap or hair-dressing, something that reminded him of the long-ago Éva Kereny, his first love in Debrecen. She kissed his dry lips and put her head on his shoulder. He let her hold him, too exhausted to resist.

“Have some respect, Squad Captain,” came a voice from across the ward. It was Mendel, lying in his own clean bed. He, too, had had his head shaved bare.

Andras raised his hand and waved. “My apologies, Serviceman,” he said. It gave him a feeling of vertigo to be here in a military hospital with Mendel Horovitz, and to have Klara beside him at the same time. His head ached. He lay back against his pillow and let Klara give him his vitamins and broth. His wife. Klara Lévi. He opened his eyes to look at her, at the familiar sweep of her hair across her brow, the lean strength of her arms, the way she pressed her lips inward as she concentrated, her deep gray eyes resting on him, on him, at last.

It didn’t take him long to understand that the furlough was another form of torture, a lesson that had to be learned in preparation for a more difficult test. Before, when he’d gotten his call-up notice, he’d had only the vaguest idea of what it might mean to be separated from Klara. Now he knew. In the face of that misery, two weeks seemed an impossibly short time.

His furlough began officially when he was released from the military hospital, three days after he had entered it. Klara had had his uniform laundered and mended, and on the day of his release she brought him the miraculous gift of a new pair of boots. He had new underclothes, new socks, a new peaked cap with a shining brass button at the front. He felt more than a little ashamed to appear in front of Mendel Horovitz in those fine clean clothes. Mendel had no one to take care of him. He was unmarried, and his mother had died when he was a boy; his father was still in Zalaszabar. As he stood with Andras and Klara near the hospital gate, waiting for the streetcar, Andras asked him how he planned to spend the furlough.

Mendel shrugged. “An old roommate of mine still lives in Budapest. I can stay with him.”

Klara touched Andras’s arm, and they exchanged a glance. It was a difficult thing to decide without discussion; it had been so long since they’d been alone together. But Mendel was an old friend, and during their time in the 112/30th he’d become Andras’s family. They both knew Andras had to make the offer.

“We’re going to my parents’ house in the country,” he said. “There’s room, if you’d like to come. Nothing fancy. But I’m certain my mother would take good care of you.”

The shadows around Mendel’s eyes deepened into an expression of gratitude. “It’s good of you, Parisi,” he said.

So that morning it was the three of them together on the train to Konyár. They rode past Maglód, past Tápiogyörgy, past Újszász, into the Hajdú flatlands, sharing a thermos of coffee among them and eating cherry strudel. The tart sweetness of the fruit nearly brought tears to Andras’s eyes. He took Klara’s hand and pressed it between his own; she met his gaze and he felt she understood him. She was a person who knew something about shock, about returning from a state of desperation. He wondered how she had tolerated his own ignorance for so long.