The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  Afterward they lay on the bed and he stared at the ceiling, at its pattern of pressed flowers and leaves. She turned onto her side and put a hand on his chest. A velvety drowsiness pinned him to the bed, his head on her pillow. Her scent was in his hair, on his hands, everywhere.

  "Klara," he said. "Am I dead? Are you still here?"

  "I'm still here," she said. "You're not dead."

  "What are we supposed to do now?"

  "Nothing," she said. "Just lie here for a little while."

  "All right," he said, and lay there.

  After a few minutes she removed her hand from his chest and rolled away from him, then got out of bed and went off down the hall. A moment later he heard the thunder of running water and the low roar and hiss of a gas heater. When she reappeared in the bedroom doorway, she was wearing a dressing gown.

  "Come have a bath," she said.

  She didn't have to coax him. He followed her into the white-tiled bathroom, where water steamed into the porcelain tub. She let the dressing gown drop and climbed into the water as he stood watching, speechless. He could have stood there all night while she bathed. Her image burned itself into his retinas: the small, high breasts; the twin wings of her hips; the smooth plane of her belly. And now, in the electric light of the bathroom, he saw something he hadn't noticed before: a crescent-shaped scar with faint stitch-marks, just above the neat dark triangle of her hair. He stepped forward to touch her. He ran his hand along her belly, down to the scar, and brushed it with his fingers.

  "She was a difficult birth," Klara said. "In the end, a cesarean. She was too much for me, even then."

  Andras had an unbidden vision of Klara as a fifteen-year-old, straining upward on a metal table. The image hit him like a train. His knees seemed to liquefy, and he had to brace himself against the wall.

  "Come in with me," she said, and gave him her hand. He climbed into the bathtub and sank down into the water. She took the cloth and washed him from head to toe; she poured shampoo into her hands and massaged it into his scalp. Then they made love again, slowly, in the bathtub, and she showed him how to touch her, and he concluded that his life was over, that he would never want to do anything else in this lifetime. Then he washed her as she had washed him, every inch of her, and then they staggered to bed.

  Nothing in his life had prepared him to imagine that a series of days might be spent the way they spent the next ten days. Later, in the darkest moments of the years that followed, he would come back again and again to those days, reminding himself that if he died, and if death led him into formless silence instead of into some other brighter life, he would still have experienced those days with Klara Morgenstern.

  The Brecht play had gone dark for the holidays; Elisabet would be in Chamonix until the second of January. The studio was closed; school was out until after the new year; Andras's friends had gone home for the duration. Mrs. Apfel had gone to her daughter-in-law's cottage in Aixen-Provence. Even the signs advertising meetings of anti-Jewish organizations had ceased to appear. At all hours of the day, the streets were filled with people out shopping or on their way to parties. Klara had been invited to half a dozen parties herself, but she cancelled all her engagements. Andras went to his cold attic for some articles of clothing and his sketchbooks, locked the door behind him, and decamped to the rue de Sevigne.

  They went on an expedition for provisions: potatoes for potato pancakes, cold roast chicken, bread, cheese, wine, a cake packed with currants. At a music shop on rue Montmartre they bought records for five francs apiece, comic operettas and American jazz and ballets. With their arms full and their pockets empty, they returned to Klara's apartment and set up house. Chanukah began that night. They made potato pancakes, filling the kitchen with the rich smell of hot oil, and they lit candles. They made love in the kitchen and in the bedroom and once, awkwardly, on the stairs. The next day they went skating at the other skating pond, the one at the Bois de Boulogne, where they were unlikely to see anyone they knew. The skaters at the park wore bright colors against the gray of the afternoon; there was a marked-off patch at the center of the ice where the more adroit among them executed spins. Andras and Klara skated until their lips were blue with cold. Every night they bathed together; every morning they woke and made love. Andras received an astonishing education in the ways a human being could experience pleasure. At night, when he woke and thought of Klara, it amazed him that he could turn over and curl himself around her. He surprised her with his knowledge of cookery, gained from watching his mother. He could make palacsinta, thin egg pancakes, with chocolate or jam or apple filling; he could make paprikas burgonya and spaetzle, and red cabbage with caraway seeds. They slept long and gloriously in the afternoons.

  They made love in the middle of the day on Klara's white bed while freezing rain fell outside. They made love late at night in the dance studio, on rugs they'd dragged down from upstairs. One time, on the way home from a cafe, they made love against the wall in an alleyway.

  They celebrated New Year's Eve at the Bastille, with thousands of other cheering Parisians. Afterward they drank a bottle of champagne in the sitting room and ate a feast of cold pate and bread and cheese and cornichons. Neither of them wanted to sleep, knowing that the next day would be the last of that string of impossible days. When dawn broke, instead of going to bed they put on coats and hats and went walking by the river.

  The sun cast its gold light onto the buttresses of Notre-Dame; the streets were full of cabs taking drowsy revelers home to their apartments. They sat on a bench in the dead garden at the eastern tip of Ile St.-Louis and kissed each other's freezing hands, and Andras dredged from his mind a Marot poem he'd learned with Professor Vago:D'Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige Anne (par jeu) me jecta de la Neige Que je cuidoys froide certainement;

  Mais estoit feu, l'experience en ay-je;

  Car embrase je fuz soubdainement.

  Puis que le feu loge secretement

  Dedans la Neige, ou trouveray je place

  Pour n'ardre point? Anne, ta seule grace

  Estaindre peult le feu que je sens bien,

  Non point par Eau, par Neige, ne par Glace,

  Mais par sentir un feu pareil au mien.

  And when she protested against sixteenth-century French after a night of sleeplessness and drinking, he whispered another version into her ear, a spontaneous Hungarian translation of that hot exchange between the poet Marot and his girlfriend: as a game Anne threw snow at him, and it was cold, of course. But what he felt was heat, because he found himself in her arms. If fire dwelt secretly in snow, how could he escape burning? Only Anne's mercy could control the flame. Not with water, snow, nor ice, but with a fire like his own.

  When he woke that afternoon, Klara lay fast asleep beside him, her hair tangled on the pillows. He got up, pulled on his trousers, washed his face. His head throbbed. He cleaned up the remnants of the previous night's sitting-room picnic, made coffee in the kitchen, drank a slow black cup and rubbed his temples. He wanted Klara to be awake, to be with him, but he didn't want to wake her. So he refilled his cup and roamed the apartment by himself. He walked through the empty dining room, where they'd had their first lunch together; he walked through the sitting room, where he'd seen her for the first time. He took a long look at the bathroom with its miraculous hot-water heater, where they'd spent long hours bathing. Finally, in the hall, he paused before Elisabet's bedroom.

  Their travels through the rooms had never taken them there, but now he pushed the door open. Elisabet's room was surprisingly neat; her dresses hung in a limp row in the open wardrobe. Two pairs of brown shoes were ranged underneath: a caramel-colored pair on the left, a chestnut-colored pair on the right. On the dresser there was a wooden music box with tulips painted on the lid. A silver comb stood upright between the bristles of a silver brush. An empty perfume flask glowed yellow-green. He opened the top dresser drawer: grayish cotton underwear and grayish cotton brassieres. A few handkerchiefs.

  Some fr
ayed hair ribbons. A broken slide rule. A tube of epoxy rolled tight all the way to its tip. Six cigarettes bound with a strip of paper.

  He closed the drawer and sat down in the little wooden chair beside the bed. He looked at the yellow coverlet, at the rag doll keeping watch over the silent room, and considered how furious Elisabet would be if she knew what had happened in her absence.

  Though there was some small hint of triumph in the feeling, there was also a sense of fear; if she found out, he knew she wouldn't stand for it. He couldn't know what effect her anger might have upon her mother, but at the very least he knew that Klara's ties to Elisabet were far stronger than her tenuous ties to him. The scar on her belly reminded him of it every time they made love.

  He turned and left the little room, and went to Klara where she lay sleeping on the tumbled bed. She had curled herself around the pillow he'd been using. She was naked, her legs tangled in the eiderdown. In the silvery northern light of the winter afternoon, he could see the hairline creases at the corners of her eyes, the faint signs of her age. He loved her, wanted her, felt himself stirring again at the sight of her. He knew he would be willing to give his life to protect her. He wanted to take her to Budapest and heal whatever terrible hurt had occurred there, see her walk into the drawing room of that house on Benczur utca and put her hands into her mother's hands. His eyes burned at the thought that he was only twenty-two, a student, unable to do anything of substance for her. The lives they'd been leading those past ten days hadn't been their real lives. They hadn't worked, hadn't taken care of anyone but themselves, hadn't had much need for money. But money was an ever-present woe for him. It would be years before he'd have a steady income. If his studies went as planned, it would be another four and a half years before he became an architect. And he'd lived long enough already, and had faced enough difficulty, to know that things seldom went as planned.

  He touched her shoulder. She opened her gray eyes and looked at him. "What is it?" she said. She sat up and held the eiderdown against herself. "What's happened?"

  "Nothing's happened," he said, sitting down beside her. "I've just been thinking about what's to happen after."

  "Oh, Andras," she said, and smiled drowsily. "Not that. That's my least favorite subject at the moment."

  This was the way it had gone, anytime either of them had introduced the topic over the past week or so; they had turned it aside, allowed it to drift away as they drifted into another series of pleasures. It was easy enough to do; their real lives had come to seem far less real than the one they were leading together on the rue de Sevigne. But now their time was nearly finished. They couldn't avoid the subject any longer.

  "We have six more hours," he said. "Then our lives begin again."

  She slipped her arms around him. "I know."

  "I want to have everything with you," he said. "A real life. God help me! I want you beside me at night, every night. I want to have a child with you." He had not yet said these things aloud; he could feel the blood rushing to his skin as he spoke.

  Klara was silent for a long moment. She dropped her arms, sat back against the pillows, put her hand in his. "I have a child already," she said.

  "Elisabet's not a child." But those vulnerable shoes at the bottom of the closet.

  The painted box on the dresser. The hidden cigarettes.

  "She's my daughter," Klara said. "She's what I've lived for these sixteen years. I can't just take up another life."

  "I know. But I can't not see you, either."

  "Perhaps it would be best, though," she said, and looked away from him. Her voice had fallen almost to a whisper. "Perhaps it would be best to stop with what we've had. Our lives may spoil it."

  But what would his life be without her, now that he knew what it was to be with her? He wanted to weep, or to take her by the shoulders and shake her. "Is that what you've thought all along?" he said. "That this was a lark? That when our lives began again it would be over?"

  "I didn't think about what would happen," she said. "I didn't want to. But we've got to think about it now."

  He got out of bed and took his shirt and trousers from a chair. He couldn't look at her. "What good will that do?" he said. "You've already decided it's impossible."

  "Please, Andras," she said. "Don't go."

  "Why should I stay?"

  "Don't be angry at me. Don't leave like that."

  "I'm not angry," he said. But he finished dressing, then retrieved his suitcase from beneath the bed and began to pack the few articles of clothing he'd brought from the rue des Ecoles.

  "There are things you don't know about me," she said. "Things that might frighten you, or change the way you felt."

  "That's right," he said. "And there's a great deal you don't know about me. But what does that matter now?"

  "Don't be cruel to me," she said. "I'm as unhappy as you are."

  He wanted to believe that it was true, but it couldn't have been; he'd laid himself open before her and she'd withdrawn from him. He put his last few things in the suitcase and snapped the latches, then went into the hallway and took his coat from the rack. She followed him to the top of the stairs, where she stood barefoot and bare-shouldered, the sheet wrapped around her as though she were a Greek sculpture. He buttoned his coat. He couldn't believe he was going to walk down the stairs and through the door, not knowing when he'd see her again. He put a hand to her arm. Touched her shoulder. Tugged a corner of the sheet so that it fell from her body. In the dim hallway she stood naked before him. He couldn't bear to look at her, couldn't bear to touch or kiss her. And so he did what a moment before had seemed unimaginable: He descended the stairs, past the eyes of all those child dancers in their ethereal costumes, opened the door, and left her.

  PART TWO

  Broken Glass

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  What Happened at the Studio

  CLASSES BEGAN the first Monday of January with a two-day charrette. Within a span of forty-eight hours they had to design a freestanding living space of fifty meters square, with a movable wall, two windows, a bath, a galley kitchen. They would submit a front elevation of the building, a floor plan, and a model. Forty-eight hours, during which anyone who cared about the project wouldn't eat a meal or sleep or leave the studio.

  Andras took the project like an oblivion drug, felt the crush of time in his veins, willed it to make him forget his ten days with Klara. He bent over the plane of his worktable and made it the landscape of his mind. The Gare d'Orsay critique had left its imprint; he vowed that he would not be humiliated before the rest of the class, before that smug Lemarque and the ranks of the upperclassmen. Toward the end of his thirtieth waking hour he looked at his design and found that what he'd drawn was his parents' house in Konyar, with a few details changed. One bedroom, not two. An indoor bath instead of the tin tub and outhouse. A modern indoor kitchen. One external wall had become a movable wall; it could be opened in summer to let the house communicate with the garden. The facade was plain and white with a many-paned window. On his second sleepless night he drew the movable wall as a curve; when it was open it would make a shady niche. He drew a stone bench in the garden, a circular reflecting pool. His parents' house made over into a country retreat. He feared it was absurd, that everyone would see it for what it was: a Hajdu boy's design, rude and primitive. He turned it in at the last minute and received, to his surprise, an appreciative nod and a paragraph of closely written praise from Vago, and the grudging approval of even the harshest fifth-year students.

  At the Bernhardt they struck the set of The Mother and held auditions for Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna. Though Zoltan Novak pleaded, Madame Gerard would not take a role in the new play; she'd already been offered the role of Lady Macbeth at the Theatre des Ambassadeurs, and Novak couldn't pay her what they would. Andras was grateful for her impending departure. He couldn't look at her without thinking of Klara, without wondering whether Madame Gerard knew what had happened between them. The day before she departed
for the Ambassadeurs he helped her box up her dressing room: her Chinese robe, her tea things, her makeup, a thousand fan letters and postcards and little presents. As they worked she told him about the members of the new company she would join, two of whom had been featured in American films, and one of whom had appeared with Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet. He found it difficult to pay attention.

  He wanted to tell her what had happened. He had told no one; even to have told his friends at school would have reduced it somehow, made it seem a superficial and fleeting liaison. But Madame Gerard knew Klara; she would know what it meant. She might even be able to offer some hope. So he closed the dressing-room door and confessed it all, omitting only the revelation about the letter.

  Madame Gerard listened gravely. When he'd finished, she got to her feet and paced the green rug in front of the dressing-room mirror as if bringing a monologue to mind. At last she turned and put her hands on the backrest of her makeup chair. "I knew it," she said. "I knew, and I ought to have said something. When I saw you at the Bois de Vincennes, I knew. You didn't care at all for the girl. You looked only at Klara. I'll admit," and she turned her eyes from him, laughing ruefully to herself, "old as I am, I was a little jealous. But I never thought you'd act upon your feelings."