The InvisibleBridge

It was ten kilometers to the work site; there, they were issued picks and shovels and divided into twenty teams of six. Each team had two wheelbarrow men and four shovelers. They could see hundreds of these teams shoveling dirt and carting it away, leveling the roadbed for the laying of gravel and asphalt. A line of leveled road stretched back toward Turka; a trail of red surveyors’ markers pricked the green infinity between the work site and Skhidnytsya. Overseers snaked among the groups, slicing at the labor servicemen’s backs and legs with narrow wooden rods.

They worked for five hours without pause. At noon they were given ten decagrams of a bread so gritty it must have been baked with sawdust, and a ladleful of watery turnip soup. Then they worked until nightfall and marched home in the dark. At the orphanage the company cook gave them each a cupful of onion broth. They were lined up in the courtyard and made to stand at attention for three hours before Kozma sent them to bed in their child-sized bunks. And that was to be the structure of their new lives.

Andras had a top bunk near a window, and Mendel had the bunk beside him, above the Ivory Tower. József occupied the bunk below Andras. Their first week at the orphanage Andras could hear József turning and shifting for hours on the hard wooden slats. Every time he turned, he shook Andras from the edge of sleep. By the fifth night Andras felt inclined to strangle him. All he wanted was to sleep so he wouldn’t have to think about where he was, and why. But József wouldn’t allow it. He rolled and shifted, rolled and shifted, for hours and hours.

“Stop it!” Andras hissed. “Go to sleep.”

“Go to hell,” József whispered.

“You go to hell.”

“I’m in hell already,” József said. “I’m going to die here. I know it.”

“Something will kill us all, eventually,” Mendel offered from the neighboring bunk.

“I’ve got a weak constitution and a short temper,” József said. “I make bad decisions. I’m liable to talk back to someone with a gun.”

“You’ve been in the work service for two months now,” Andras said. “You haven’t died yet.”

“This isn’t Szentendre,” József said.

“Think of it as Szentendre with worse food and an uglier commander.”

“For God’s sake, Lévi, aren’t you listening? I need help.”

“Keep it down!” someone said.

Andras climbed down from his bunk and sat at the edge of József’s. He found József’s eyes in the dark. “What is it?” he whispered. “What do you want?”

“I don’t want to die before I’m thirty,” József whispered back, his voice breaking like a boy’s. He ran a hand under his nose. “I’m unprepared for this. I’ve done nothing these past five years but eat and drink and fuck and make paintings. I can’t survive work camp.”

“Yes, you can. You’re young and healthy. You’ll get through it.”

They sat silent for a long moment, listening to the breathing of the men around them. The sound of fifty men breathing in their sleep: It was like the string section of an orchestra playing on stringless violins and violas and cellos, an endless shushing of horsehair on wood. Every now and then a woodwind sneeze or a brassy cough would break the stream of breathing, but the stringless music continued, a constant sighing in the dark.

“Is that all, then?” József said, finally. “That’s what you’ve got for me?”

“Here’s the truth,” Andras said. “I don’t have much heart to give you a pep talk.”

“I don’t want a pep talk,” József whispered. “I want to know how to survive. You’ve been doing this for almost three years. Don’t you have any advice?”

“Well, don’t publish a subversive newspaper, for one thing,” Andras said. “You might find your commanding officer pointing a gun at you across his desk.”

“Is that what happened?” József said. “What did he want?”

“Our printing plates and originals. He threatened to search our houses if we didn’t produce them.”

“Oh, God. What did you tell him?”

“The truth. The originals are in our editor’s office at the Jewish News. Or were. Varsádi’s got them by now, I’m sure.”

József let out a long breath. “That’ll have been a bad day at work for your editor.”

“I know. I’ve been sick about it. But what were we going to do? We couldn’t send Varsádi’s men to Nefelejcs utca.”

“All right,” József whispered. “I’ll be certain not to publish a subversive newspaper. What else?”

Andras told József what he knew: Keep quiet. Become invisible. Don’t make enemies of the other work servicemen. Don’t talk back to the guards. Eat what they give you, no matter how bad it is, and always save something for later. Keep as clean as you can. Keep your feet dry. Take care of your clothes so they don’t fall apart. Know which guards are sympathetic. Follow all the rules you can stand to follow; when you break the rules, don’t get caught. Don’t let yourself forget the life back home. Don’t forget that your term of service is finite.

He went silent, remembering the other list he and Mendel had made long ago, the ten commandments of the Munkaszolgálat. Had it only been three years since he’d been sent to Carpatho-Ruthenia? By whose reckoning could the term of service be called finite? Suddenly he couldn’t stand to think or talk about it a moment longer. “I’ve got to get to sleep,” he said.

“All right,” József said. “Listen, though. Thanks.”

“Shut up, you idiots,” Mendel whispered from the neighboring bunk.

“You’re welcome,” Andras said. “Now go to sleep.”

Andras climbed up into his own bunk and wrapped himself in his blanket. József didn’t make another sound; his tossing and shifting had stilled. But Andras lay awake and listened to the other men’s breathing. He remembered quiet nights like this from the begi

He had to think of Klara, he told himself. He had to think of Tamás. And his parents, and Tibor, and Mátyás. He had to pretend it wasn’t hopeless; he had to allow himself to be fooled into staying alive. He had to make himself a willing party to the insidious trick of love.