The Invisible Bridge

CHAPTER ONE

A Letter

Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn't bought the tickets. But it was Tibor's opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy's box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar's jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women's hair glittering with jewels.

"If only Mátyás could see this," Andras said.

"He'll see it, Andráska. He'll come to Budapest when he's got his baccalaureate, and in a year he'll be sick to death of this place."

Andras had to smile. He and Tibor had both moved to Budapest as soon as they graduated from gimnázium in Debrecen. They had all grown up in Konyár, a tiny village in the eastern flatlands, and to them, too, the capital

Julie Orringer is the author of the award-winning short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is the winner of The Paris Review's Discovery Prize and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is researching a new novel.

Praise for Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge

"One of the best books of the year."
-Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"If you're still looking for a 'big' novel to carry into the summer holidays-one in which you can lose yourself without the guilty suspicion that you're slumming-then Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge is the book you want. . . . Stunning. . . . In every admirable sense an 'ambitious' historical novel, in which large human emotions-profound love, familial bonds and the deepest of human loyalties-play out against the backdrop of unimaginable cruelty. . . . Orringer traverses this perilous rhetorical terrain with remarkable-and, more important, convincing, self-possession. . . . Remarkably affecting. . . . A life powerfully, unsentimentally and inspiringly evoked in this gracefully written and altogether remarkable first novel."
-Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

"The Invisible Bridge deserves to be praised. It takes the introspective themes we've loved so well in American literature-from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself to A. M. Homes's Music for Torching-and points them in a different direction. . . . Rendered in sweeping, epic fashion . . . a close look at the terrible ways that enormous historical events can affect individual lives. . . . The strength of The Invisible Bridge lies in Orringer's ability to make us care so deeply about the people of her all-too-real fictional world."
-Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"Evocative . . . exquisitely precise . . . rapturous . . . uses history as a backdrop to her story's grand passions with a sweep akin to that of Dr. Zhivago. . . . The horrors of war never become Ms. Orringer's primary subject. She devotes far more attention to conveying the intricacies of Jewish life . . . writing with both granddaughterly reverence and commanding authority."
-Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Intricately layered. . . . We have seen images like