The InvisibleBridge by Julie Orringer

Author:Julie Orringer [Orringer, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

PART FOUR. The InvisibleBridge

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX. Subcarpathía

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.

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