The Invisible Bridge

Epilogue

IN THE SPRING, on afternoons when she didn’t have soccer practice, she would skip her last class-orchestra-and take the 6 uptown to her grandfather’s building. She thought of it that way, his building, though he didn’t live there or own it. It was a four-story building set at an angle to the street; the façade was made up of hundreds of small rectangles of steel-framed glass, shunted skyward in a violent and asymmetrical upward thrust, like an exploding Japanese screen. Slim birches grew in the trapezoid of earth between building and sidewalk. The marble lintel above the door read AMOS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART; her grandfather’s name was chiseled into the cornerstone, above the word ARCHITECT. The building housed a small collection of paintings and sculptures and photographs she’d seen a thousand times. In its central courtyard was a café where she always ordered her coffee black. At thirteen she considered herself on the cusp of womanhood. She liked to sit at a table and write letters to her brother at Brown, or to her friends from camp in the Berkshires. She would sit for hours, almost until dinnertime, and then she would run to catch the express, hoping to make it back to the apartment before her parents got home from work.

Her grandparents didn’t live in the city. They lived upstate, down the road from her great-uncle, and five miles away from the man whom she called uncle but who was her grandfather’s friend. Sometimes she went to visit them on weekends. Three hours by train, which passed quickly if you had a window seat. Her grandfather had a barn he’d converted into a workshop, with high windows that let in northern light. They all worked there still, her grandfather and her great-uncle and her not-uncle uncle, though they were old enough to retire. They let her sit at their sloping desks and use their ink-stained tools. She liked to draw oblique entryways, fractured rooflines, curvilinear façades. They gave her books about architects they’d known, Le Corbusier and Pingusson. They taught her the Latin names of arches and showed her how to use the French curve and the beam compass. They taught her the single-stroke Roman lettering they used to label their plans.

They had lived through the war. Every now and then it drifted into their speech: During the war, and then a story about how little they’d had to eat, or how they’d survived the cold, or how long they’d gone without seeing each other. She’d learned about that war in school, of course-who had died, who killed whom, how, and why-though her books hadn’t had much to say about Hungary. She’d learned other things about the war from watching her grandmother, who saved plastic bags and glass jars, and kept bottles of water in the house in case of disaster, and made layer cakes with half as much butter and sugar as the recipes called for, and who, at times, would begin to cry for no reason. And she’d learned about it from her father, who’d been hardly more than a baby at the time but who could remember walking with his mother through ruins.

There were strands of darker stories. She didn’t know how she’d heard them; she thought she must have absorbed them through her skin, like medicine or poison. Something about labor camps. Something about being made to eat newspapers. Something about a disease that came from lice. Even when she wasn’t thinking about those half stories, they did their work in her mind. A few weeks ago she’d had a dream from which she’d woken shouting in fright. She and her parents had been standing in a cold black-walled room, wearing pajamas made of flour sacks. In a corner her grandmother knelt on the concrete floor, weeping. Her grandfather stood before them, too thin, unshaven. A German guard came out of the shadows and made him climb onto a raised conveyor belt, something like the luggage carousel at the airport. The guard put cuffs around his ankles and wrists, then stepped to a wooden lever beside the conveyor belt and pushed it forward. A meshing of gears, a grinding of iron teeth. The belt began to move. Her grandfather rounded a corner and disappeared into a rectangle of light, from beyond which came a deafening clap that meant he was dead.

That was when she’d shouted herself awake.

Her parents had come running into the room. What is it? What is it?

You don’t want to know.

Today she sat in the courtyard with her notebook and her bitter coffee, the first time she’d been there since the dream. It was a deep blue afternoon, sun slanting through the courtyard in a way that reminded her of the north woods and camp. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the conveyor belt and that deafening shock of noise. She couldn’t concentrate on writing to her brother. She couldn’t drink her coffee, or even take a deep breath. She reminded herself that her grandfather wasn’t dead. Her grandmother wasn’t dead. And her great-uncle, and the uncle who wasn’t her uncle-none of them were dead. Even her father had survived, and his sister, her aunt Április, who’d been born in the middle of it all.

But then there was the other great-uncle, the one who had died. He’d had a wife, and his son would have been her father’s age now. They had all died in the war. Her grandparents almost never talked about them, and when they did, they spoke in lowered voices. All that was left of that uncle was a photograph taken when he was twenty years old. He was handsome, with a strong jaw and heavy dark hair, and he wore a pair of silver-framed glasses. He didn’t look like someone who expected to die. He looked like he was supposed to live to be a white-haired old man like his brothers.

Instead there was just that photograph. And their last name, a memorial.

She wanted to hear the whole story: what that brother had been like as a boy, what he’d been good at in school, what he’d wanted to do with his life, where he’d lived, who he’d loved, how he’d died. If her own brother died, she would tell her granddaughter everything about him. If her granddaughter asked.

Maybe that was the problem: She hadn’t asked. Or maybe even now they didn’t want to talk about it. But she would ask, next time she went to visit. It seemed right that they should tell her, now that she was thirteen. She wasn’t a child anymore. She was old enough now to know.

Any Case

It could have happened.

It had to happen.

It happened earlier. Later.

Closer. Farther away.

It happened, but not to you.

You survived because you were first.

You survived because you were last.

Because alone. Because the others.

Because on the left. Because on the right.

Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.

Because a shadow fell.

Luckily there was a forest.

Luckily there were no trees.

Luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,

a frame, a turn, an inch, a second.

Luckily a straw was floating on the water.

Thanks to, thus, in spite of, and yet.

What would have happened if a hand, a leg,

One step, a hair away?

So you are here? Straight from that moment still suspended?

The net’s mesh was tight, but you? through the mesh?

I can’t stop wondering at it, can’t be silent enough.

Listen,

How quickly your heart is beating in me.

– Wislawa Szymborska

translated from the Polish by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds