The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  And then what? What would he do, given the chance? For one brief delirious moment he thought of those old photographs that depicted the elaborate sexual positions, the silver images of entwined couples visible only when the cards were held at an angle to the light. He remembered standing in the changing room near the gymnastics hall with four other boys, each of them hunched over and holding a card, their gym shorts around their ankles, each in solitary agony as the silver couples flashed into and out of view. His card had shown a woman lying on a settee, her legs raised in a sharp V. She wore a Victorian-style gown that revealed her arms and shoulders and had fallen away from her legs entirely, leaving them bare as they strained toward the ceiling. A man bent over her, doing what even the Victorians did.

  Flushed with shame and desire, he scratched out the lines again to begin another draft. He dipped his pen and wiped off the excess ink. Dear Madame Morgenstern, Thank you for your hospitality and for the pleasure of your company. Myown accommodations are too poor to allow me to return your invitation, but if I may be of service to you in some other way, I hope you will not hesitate to call upon me. In the meantime I shall retain the hope that we will meet again. Yours sincerely, ANDRAS LEVI

  He read and reread the draft, wondering if he should try to write in French instead of Hungarian; finally he decided he was likely to make an imbecillic error in French. He wrote a fair copy on a sheet of thin white paper, which he folded in half and sealed into an envelope before he could begin to reexamine every line. Then he mailed the letter at the same blue box where he'd posted the letter from her mother.

  That week he was grateful for the hard, painstaking work of model-building. In the studio he cut a rectangle of thick pasteboard to serve as a base for the model, and he traced the footprint of the building onto the base in a thin pencil line. On another piece of pasteboard he drew the shapes of the building's four elevations, working meticulously from his measured drawing. His favorite tool was a ruler of near-transparent cellulose through which he could see the pencil lines that intersected the one he was drawing; that ruler, with its strict grid of millimeters, was an island of exactitude in the sea of tasks he had to complete, a strip of certainty in the midst of his uncertainty. Every piece of the model had to be made from sturdy material that could not be bought at a discount or substituted with flimsy stuff; everyone recalled what had happened during the first week of classes, when Polaner, trying to stretch his dwindling supply of francs, had used Bristol paper for a model, rather than pasteboard. In the middle of the critique, when Professor Vago had tapped the roof of Polaner's model with his mechanical pencil, one wall had buckled and sent the paper chateau to its knees. Pasteboard was expensive; Andras could not afford to make a mistake, neither in the ink drawing nor the cutting. It provided some comfort to work alongside Rosen and Ben Yakov and Polaner, who were building the Ecole Militaire, the Rotonde de la Villette, and the Theatre de l'Odeon, respectively. Even smug Lemarque provided a welcome distraction; he'd decided to build a model of the twenty-sided Cirque d'Hiver, and could be heard periodically swearing as he traced wall after wall onto pasteboard.

  In statics class there was the clear plain order of math: the three-variable equation to calculate the number and thickness of steel rods per cubic meter of concrete, the number of kilograms a support column could bear, the precise distribution of pressure along the crown of an arch. At the front of the classroom, chalking his way through a maze of calculations on the chip-edged blackboard, stood the wildly untidy Victor Le Bourgeois, professor of statics, a practicing architect and engineer, who, like Vago, was said to be a close friend of Pingusson's. His disorder expressed itself in trousers torn at the knee, a jacket permanently grayed with chalk dust, a shaggy halo of ginger-colored hair, and a tendency to misplace the blackboard eraser. But when he began to trace the relationship between mathematical abstractions and tangible building materials, all the chaos of his person seemed to drop away. Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.

  At the theater there was the relief of being able to speak her name aloud to Madame Gerard. During intermission at the Tuesday night performance, Andras brought Madame a cup of strong coffee and waited by the door of her dressing room as she drank it. She looked up from under the graceful arch of her brows; she was stately even in the soot-stained apron and head kerchief of the Mother. "I haven't had word from Madame Morgenstern," she said. "How was your luncheon?"

  "Quite pleasance," Andras said, and blushed. "Pleasant, I mean."

  "Quite pleasant, he says."

  "Yes," Andras said. "Quite." His French vocabulary seemed to have fled.

  "Aha," said Madame Gerard, as if she understood entirely. Andras's blush deepened: He knew she must think that something had passed between himself and Elisabet. Something had, of course, though not at all what she must have imagined.

  "Madame Morgenstern is very kind," he said.

  "And

  Mademoiselle?"

  "Mademoiselle is very ..." Andras swallowed and looked at the row of lights above Madame Gerard's mirror. "Mademoiselle is very tall."

  Madame Gerard threw her head back and laughed. "Very tall!" she said. "Indeed.

  And very strong-willed. I knew her when she was a little girl playing at dolls; she used to speak to them so imperiously I thought they would burst into tears. But you mustn't be scared of Elisabet. She's harmless, I assure you."

  Before Andras could protest that he wasn't in the least afraid of Elisabet, the double bell sounded to signal the impending end of intermission. Madame had a costume change to complete, and Andras had to leave to finish his tasks before the third act began.

  Once the actors went on again, time slowed to a polar trickle. All he could think of was the letter he'd written and when a response might come. His letter might have been delivered by that afternoon's post, and she might have posted her own response today.

  Her letter could arrive as soon as tomorrow. It wasn't unreasonable to think she might invite him for lunch again that weekend.

  The next night, when the play finally ended and Andras had finished his duties for the evening, he ran all the way home to the rue des Ecoles. In his mind he could see the envelope glowing in the dark of the entryway, the cream-colored stationery, Madame Morgenstern's neat, even handwriting, the same handwriting in which she'd made the inscriptions beneath the postcards in her album. From Marie in Morocco. From Marcel in Rome. Who was Marcel, Andras wondered, and what had he written from Rome?

  As he opened the tall red door with his skeleton key, he could already make out an envelope on the console table. He let the door swing behind him as he went for the letter. But it wasn't the cream-colored lilac-scented envelope he'd hoped for; it was a wrinkled brown envelope addressed in the handwriting of his brother Matyas. Unlike Tibor, Matyas rarely wrote; when he did, the letters were thin and informational. This one was thick, requiring twice the usual amount of postage. His first thought was that something had happened to his parents--his father had been injured, his mother had caught influenza--and his second thought was of how ridiculous he'd been to expect a letter from Madame Morgenstern.

  Upstairs he lit one of his precious candles and sat down at the table. He slit the brown envelope carefully with his penknife. Inside was a creased sheaf of pages, five of them, the longest letter Matyas had ever written to him. The handwriting was large and careless and peppered with inkblots. Andras scanned the first lines for bad news about his parents, but there wasn't any. If there had been, Andras thought, Tibor would have wired him. This letter was about Matyas himself. Matyas had learned that Andras had arranged for Tibor to enter medical school in January. Congratulations to them both, to Andras for having successfully exploited his lofty connections, and to Tibor for getting to leave Hungary at last. Now he, Matyas, would certainly have to remain behind, alone, heir by default to a rural lumberyard. Did Andras thi
nk it was easy, having to hear their parents talk about how exciting Andras's studies were, how well he was doing in his classes, how wonderful it was that Tibor could now study to become a doctor, what a fine couple of sons they were? Had Andras forgotten that Matyas, too, might have hopes for his own studies abroad? Had Andras forgotten everything Matyas had said on the subject? Did Andras think Matyas was going to give up on his own plans? If he did, he'd better reconsider. Matyas was saving money. If he saved enough before he graduated, he wouldn't bother with his bac. He would run away to America, to New York, and go on the stage. He'd find a way to get by. In America all you needed was determination and the willingness to work. And once he left Hungary, it would be up to Andras and Tibor to worry about the lumberyard and their parents, because he, Matyas, would never return.

  At the end of the last page, written in a calmer hand--as if Matyas had set the letter aside for a time, then come back to finish it once his anger had burned out--was a remorseful Hope you're well. Andras gave a short, exhausted laugh. Hope you're well! He might as well have written "Hope you die."

  Andras took up a sheet of paper from the desk. Dear Matyas, he wrote. If it makes you feel any better, I've been wretched a hundred times since I've been here. I'm wretched right now. Believe me when I tell you it hasn't all been wonderful. As for you, I haven't the slightest doubt that you will finish your bac and go to America, if that's what you want (though I'd much rather you came here to Paris). I don't expect you to take over for Apa, and neither does Apa himself. He wants you to finish your studies. But Matyas was right to raise the question, right to be angry that there was no easy solution. He thought of Claire Morgenstern saying of her own mother, It's been a long time since I've seen her, a very long time. How her expression had clouded, how her eyes had filled with a grief that seemed to echo the grief he'd witnessed in her mother's features. What had parted them, and what had kept Madame Morgenstern away? With effort he turned his thoughts back to his letter. I hope you won't be angry with me for long, Matyaska, but your anger does you credit: It's evidence of what a good son you are. When I finish my studies I'll go back to Hungary, and may God keep Anya and Apa in health long enough for me to be of service to them then. In the meantime he would worry about them just as his brothers did.

  In the meantime I expect you to be brilliant and fearless in all things, as ever! With love, your ANDRAS.

  He posted the reply the next morning, hoping that the day would bring word from Madame Morgenstern. But there was no letter on the hall table that night when he returned from work. And why should he have expected her to write? he wondered. Their social exchange was complete. He had accepted Madame Morgenstern's hospitality and had sent his thanks. If he'd imagined a connection with her, he had been mistaken. And in any case he was supposed to have made a connection with her daughter, not with Madame Morgenstern herself. That night he lay awake shivering and thinking of her and cursing himself for his ridiculous hope. In the morning he found a thin layer of ice in the washbasin; he broke it with the washcloth and splashed his face with a burning sheet of ice-cold water. Outside, a stiff wind blew loose shingles off the roof and shattered them in the street. At the bakery the woman gave him hot peasant loaves straight from the oven, charging him as if they were day-old bread. It was going to be one of the coldest winters ever, she told him. Andras knew he would need a warmer coat, a woolen scarf; his boots would need to be resoled. He didn't have the money for any of it.

  All week the temperature kept falling. At school the radiators emitted a feeble dry heat; the fifth-year students took places close to them, and the first-years froze by the windows. Andras spent hopeless hours on his model of the Gare d'Orsay, a train station already drifting into obsolescence. Though it still served as the terminus for the railways of southwestern France, its platforms were too short for the long trains used now. Last time he'd gone there to take measurements, the station had looked derelict and unkempt, a few of its high windows broken, a stippling of mildew darkening its line of arches. It didn't cheer him to think he was preserving its memory in cardboard; his model was a flimsy homage to a tatterdemalion relic. On Friday he walked home alone, too dispirited to join the others at the Blue Dove--and there on the entry table was a white envelope with his name on it, the response he'd waited for all week. He tore it open in the foyer.

  Andras, you're very welcome. Please visit us again sometime. Regards, C.

  MORGENSTERN. Nothing more. Nothing certain. Please visit us again sometime: What did that mean? He sat down on the stairs and dropped his forehead against his knees. All week he'd waited for this! Regards. His heart went on drumming in his chest, as if something wonderful were still about to happen. He tasted shame like a hot fragment of metal on his tongue.

  After work that night he couldn't bear the thought of going home to his tiny room, of lying down in the bed where he'd now spent five sleepless nights thinking about Claire Morgenstern. Instead he wandered toward the Marais, drawing his thin coat closer around him. It cheered him to take an unfamiliar path through the streets of the Right Bank; he liked losing his way and finding it again, discovering the strangely named alleyways and lanes--rue des Mauvais Garcons, rue des Guillemites, rue des Blancs-Manteaux. Tonight there was a smell of winter in the air, different from the Budapest smell of brown coal and approaching snow; the Paris smell was wetter and smokier and sweeter: chestnut leaves turning to mash in the gutters, the sugary brown scent of roasted nuts, the tang of gasoline from the boulevards. Everywhere there were posters advertising the ice-skating rinks, one in the Bois de Boulogne and another in the Bois de Vincennes. He hadn't imagined that Paris would get cold enough for skating, but both sets of posters proclaimed that the ponds were frozen solid. One depicted a trio of spinning polar bears; the other showed a little girl in a short red skirt, her hands in a fur muff, one slender leg extended behind her.

  In the rue des Rosiers a man and a woman stood beside one of these posters and kissed unabashedly, their hands buried inside each other's coats. Andras was reminded of a game the children used to play in Konyar: Behind the baker's shop there was a wall of white stone that was always warm because the baker's oven was on the other side, and in the wintertime the boys would meet there after school to kiss the baker's daughter. The baker's daughter had pale brown freckles scattered across her nose like sesame seeds. For ten filler she would press you up against the wall and kiss you until you couldn't breathe.

  For five filler you could watch her do it to someone else. She was saving for a pair of ice skates. Her name was Orsolya, but they never called her that; instead they called her Korcsolya, the word for ice skates. Andras had kissed her once, had felt her tongue explore his own as she held him up against the warm wall. He couldn't have been more than eight years old; Orsolya must have been ten. Three of his friends from school were watching, cheering him on. Halfway through the kiss he'd opened his eyes. Orsolya, too, was open-eyed, but absent, her mind fixed elsewhere--perhaps on the ice skates. He'd never forgotten the day he came out of the house to see her skating on the pond, the silver flash at her soles like a teasing wink, a steely goodbye-forever to paid kissing. That winter she'd nearly died of cold, skating in all weather. "That girl will go through the ice," Andras's mother had predicted, watching Orsolya tracing loops in an early March rain. But she hadn't gone through the ice. She'd survived her winter on the millpond, and the next winter she was there again, and the one after that she'd gone away to secondary school. He could see her now, a red-skirted figure through a gray haze, untouchable and alone.

  Now he made his way though the grotto of medieval streets toward the rue de Sevigne, toward Madame Morgenstern's building. He hadn't decided to come here, but here he was; he stood on the sidewalk opposite and rocked on his heels. It was near midnight, and all the lights were out upstairs. But he crossed the street and looked over the demi-curtains into the darkened studio. There was the morning-glory horn of the phonograph, gleaming black and brutal in a corner; there was the p
iano with its flat toothy grimace. He shivered inside his coat and imagined the pink-clad forms of girls moving across the yellow plane of the studio floor. It was bitterly, blindingly cold. What was he doing out here on the street at midnight? There was only one explanation for his behavior: He'd gone mad. The pressure of his life here, of his single chance at making a man and an artist of himself, had proved too much for him. He put his head against the wall of the entryway, trying to slow his breathing; after a moment, he told himself, he would shake off this madness and find his way home. But then he raised his eyes and saw what he hadn't known he'd been looking for: There in the entryway was a slim glass-fronted case of the kind used to post menus outside restaurants; instead of a menu, this one held a white rectangle of cardstock inscribed with the legend Horaire des Classes.

  The schedule, the pattern of her life. There it was, printed in her own neat hand.

  Her mornings were devoted to private lessons, the early afternoons to beginning classes, the later afternoons to intermediate and advanced. Wednesdays and Fridays she took the mornings off. On Sundays, the afternoons. Now, at least, he knew when he might look through this window and see her. Tomorrow wasn't soon enough, but it would have to be.

  All the next day he tried to turn his thoughts away from her. He went to the studio, where everyone gathered on Saturdays to work; he built his model, joked with Rosen, heard about Ben Yakov's continuing fascination with the beautiful Lucia, shared his peasant bread with Polaner. By noon he couldn't wait any longer. He went down into the Metro at Raspail and rode to Chatelet. From there he ran all the way to the rue de Sevigne; by the time he arrived he was hot and panting in the winter chill. He looked over the demi-curtains of the studio. A crowd of little girls in dancing clothes were packing their ballet shoes into canvas satchels, holding their street shoes in their hands as they lined up at the door. The covered entrance to the studio was crowded with mothers and governesses, the mothers in furs, the governesses in woolen coats. A few little girls broke through the cluster of women and ran off toward a candy shop. He waited for the crowd at the door to clear, and then he saw her just inside the entryway: Madame Morgenstern, in a black practice skirt and a close-wrapped gray sweater, her hair gathered at the nape of her neck in a loose knot. When all the children but one had been collected, Madame Morgenstern emerged from the entryway holding the last girl's hand. She stepped lightly on the sidewalk in her dancing shoes, as if she didn't want to ruin their soles on the paving stones. Andras had a sudden urge to flee.