The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  He raced up the beach to catch her, but by the time he got there she was nowhere to be seen. In the lobby, the desk clerk denied having seen a woman in green walk past; the doormen had seen her leave, but one of them thought she'd headed away from town and another thought she'd headed toward it. The car was still parked where they'd left it, at the outside corner of a dusty lot. It was quite dark now. He thought she wouldn't walk toward town, not in her current mood. He got into the car and drove at a crawl along the beach road. He hadn't gotten far before his headlights illuminated a sea-green flash against the roadside. She was walking swiftly, her sandals raising clouds of dust. She'd wrapped her arms around herself; he could see the familiar sweet column of her vertebrae rising out of the deep-cut back of her dress. He brought the car to a stop and jumped out to catch up with her. She gave him a swift glance over her shoulder and kept walking.

  "Klara," he said. "Klarika."

  She stopped finally, her arms limp at her sides. From around a curve in the road came a sweep of headlights; they splashed across her body as a roadster tore past and shot off toward the center of town, its passengers shouting a song into the night. When it had gone, there was nothing but the thrum and pound of waves. For a long time neither of them spoke. She wouldn't turn to face him.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know why I left you sitting there."

  "Let's just go home," she said. "I don't want to talk about this on the side of the road."

  "Don't be angry."

  "It's my fault. I shouldn't have brought up the past. It makes me miserable to think of it, and that must have been what made you get up and go down to the beach."

  "It was the absinthe," he said. "It makes me crazy."

  "It wasn't the absinthe," she said.

  "Klara,

  please."

  "I'm cold," she said, and put her arms around herself. "I want to get back to the house."

  He drove them, feeling no satisfaction in his mastery of the road; when they got out of the car there was no celebration of his skill. Klara went into the yard and sat down in one of the wooden chairs they'd dragged outside. He sat down beside her.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I did a foolish thing, a selfish thing, leaving you there at the table."

  She didn't seem to hear him. She'd retreated to some distant place of her own, too small to admit him. "It's been little more than torture for you, hasn't it?" she said.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "All of it. Our connection. My half-truths. Everything I haven't told you."

  "Don't speak in those maddening generalizations," he said. "What half-truths? Do you mean what happened with Novak? I thought we'd moved past that, Klara. What else do you want to tell me?"

  She shook her head. Then she put her hand to her eyes and her shoulders began to shake.

  "What's happened to you?" he said. "I didn't do this. I didn't make this happen by walking down to the beach for a smoke."

  "No," she said, looking up, her eyes lit with tears. "It's just that I understood something while you were down there."

  "What is it?" he said. "If it has a name, tell me."

  "I ruin things," she said. "I'm a ruiner. I take what's good and make it bad. I take what's bad and make it worse. I did it to my daughter and to Zoltan, and now I've done it to you. I saw how unhappy you looked before you left the table."

  "Ah, I see. It's all your fault. You forced Elisabet to have the problems she's had.

  You forced Novak to deceive his wife. You forced me to fall in love with you. The three of us had no part in it at all."

  "You don't know the half of what I've done."

  "Then tell me! What is it? Tell me."

  She shook her head.

  "And if you don't?" he said. He got to his feet and took her by the arm, pulled her up beside him. "How are we supposed to go on? Will you keep me in ignorance? Will I learn the truth someday from your daughter?"

  "No," she said, almost too quietly to hear. "Elisabet doesn't know."

  "If we're to be together, I have to know everything. You've got to decide, Klara. If you want this to continue, you'll have to be honest with me."

  "You're hurting my arm," she said.

  "Who was he? Just tell me his name."

  "Who?"

  "That man you loved. Elisabet's father."

  She yanked her arm away. In the moonlight he could see the fabric of her dress straining against her ribs and going smooth again. Her eyes filled with tears. "Don't ever grab me like that," she said, and began to sob. "I want to go home. Please, Andras. I'm sorry. I want to go home to Paris." She put her arms around herself, shivering as though she'd caught a fever in the cool Mediterranean night. Her starfish pin glittered like a beautiful mistake, a festive scrap torn from an ocean-liner ball, blown across the sea and caught by chance in the dark waves of her hair.

  He could see it: She'd been overtaken by something that was like a disease, something that shook her frame and brought a pallor to her skin. He saw it in the way she huddled beneath the blankets in the cottage, the way she stared flat-eyed at the wall. She was serious about going home; she wanted to leave in the morning. For an hour he lay in bed with her, wide awake, until he heard her breath slide into the rhythm of sleep. He didn't have the heart to be angry at her anymore. If she wanted to go home, he'd take her home. He could gather their things that night and be ready to leave at dawn. Careful not to wake her, he crawled out of bed and began to pack their suitcases. It was good to have something concrete and finite to do. He folded her little things: the cotton dresses, her stockings, her underclothes, her black maillot; he replaced her necklaces and earrings in the satin envelope from which he'd seen her remove them. He tucked her ballet shoes into each other and folded her practice skirts and leotards. Afterward, he put on a jacket and sat alone in the garden. In the weeds beside the driveway, crickets sang a French tune; the song his crickets sang in Konyar had had different high notes, a different rhythm. But the stars overhead were the same. There was the damsel stretched on her rock, and the little bear, and the dragon. He had pointed them out to Klara a few nights earlier; she'd made him repeat them each night until she knew them as well as he did.

  They drove back to Paris the next morning. He had helped her get up and dress in the blue morning light; she had wept when she saw he'd packed all their things. "I've ruined this holiday for you," she said. "And today's your birthday."

  "I don't care about that," he said. "Let's get home. It's a long drive."

  While she waited in the car he locked the cottage and restored the key to the bird's nest above the door. For the last time he drove down the winding road toward Nice; the sea glittered as sun began to spill across its pailletted surface. He wasn't frightened on the road, not after the lessons she'd given him. He drove toward Paris as she sat silently and watched the fields and farms. By the time they'd reached the tangle of streets outside the city, she'd fallen asleep and he had to try to remember how they'd come. The streets had their own ideas; he lost an hour trying to find his way through the suburbs before a policeman directed him to the Porte d'Italie. At last he found his way across the Seine and up the familiar boulevards to the rue de Sevigne. By that time the sun was low in the sky; the dance studio lay in shadow, and the stairs were dark. Klara woke and rubbed her face with her hands. He helped her upstairs and got her into the nightgown she'd forgotten on the bed. She lay on her back and let the tears roll down her temples and onto the pillow.

  "What can I do for you?" he asked, sitting beside her. "What do you need?"

  "Just to be alone," she said. "Just to sleep for a while."

  Her tone was strangely flat. This pale woman in the embroidered gown was the ghostly sister of the Klara he knew, the woman who'd raced from her house a week earlier in a duster and driving goggles. It seemed impossible to go home. He didn't intend to leave her in this fog. Instead he carried her things upstairs from the car, then made her a cup of the linden tea she drank when she had a headac
he. When he brought it in, she sat up in bed and extended a hand to him. He came to the bed and sat down beside her. She held his eyes with her eyes; a pink flush had spread across her chest. She laid her head on his shoulder and put her arms around his waist. He felt the rise and fall of her chest against his own.

  "What a dreadful birthday you've had," she said.

  "Not at all," he said, stroking her hair. "I've been with you all day."

  "There's something for you in the dance studio," she said. "A birthday present."

  "I don't need a present," he said.

  "Nonetheless."

  "You can give it to me another time."

  "No," she said. "You should have it on your birthday, as long as we're back anyway. I'll come down with you." She got out of bed and took his hand. Together they went down the stairs and into the dance studio. Standing against one wall was a sheet-draped object the size and shape of an upright piano.

  "My God," he said. "What is it?"

  "Take a look," she said.

  "I don't know if I dare."

  "Dare."

  He lifted the sheet by the corner and tugged it free. There, with its polished wooden drawing surface tilted toward the window, its steel base engraved with the name of a famous cabinetmaker, was a handmade drafting table as handsome and professional as Pierre Vago's. At the bottom of the drawing surface was a perfect groove for pencils; on the right side, a deep inkwell. A drafting stool stood beneath the table, its seat and brass wheels gleaming. His throat closed.

  "You don't like it," she said.

  He waited until he knew he could speak. "It's too good," he said. "It's an architect's table. Not something for a student."

  "You'll still have it when you're an architect. But I wanted you to have it now."

  "Keep it for me," he said. He turned to her and put a hand against her cheek. "If you decide we're going to be together, I'll take it home."

  The color faded from her lips and she closed her eyes. "Please," she said. "I want you to take it now. It comes apart in two pieces. Take it in the car."

  "I can't," he said. "Not now."

  "Please,

  Andras."

  "Keep it for me. Once you've had some time to think, you'll let me know if I should take it or not. But I won't take it as a memento of you. Do you understand? I won't have it instead of you."

  She nodded, her gray eyes downcast.

  "It's the best gift I've ever gotten in my life," he said.

  And their holiday was at an end. September was coming. He could feel it as he walked home along the Pont Marie, carrying his bag with twelve days' worth of clothes.

  September was sending its first cool streamers into Paris, its red tinge of burning. The scent of it blew through the channel of the Seine like the perfume of a girl on the threshold of a party. Her foot in its satin shoe had not yet crossed the sill, but everyone knew she was there. In another moment she would enter. All of Paris seemed to hold its breath, waiting.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Synagogue de la Victoire

  HE WOULD HAVE given anything to spend Rosh Hashanah in Konyar that year-

  -to go to synagogue with his father and Matyas, to eat honey cake at his mother's table, to stand in the orchard and put a hand on the trunk of his favorite apple tree, the crown of which had always been his refuge when he was frightened or lonely or depressed. Instead he found himself in his attic on the rue des Ecoles, nearing the end of his first year in Paris, waiting for Polaner to meet him so they could go to synagogue together on the rue de la Victoire. Four weeks had passed since he'd last spoken to Klara. And as the Jewish year drew to a close, all of Europe seemed to hang from a filament above an abyss. As soon as he had returned to consciousness after Nice, as soon as he'd read the letters waiting for him and made his way through the usual sheaf of newspapers, he'd been reminded that there were worse things happening in Europe than the refusal of Klara Morgenstern to reveal the essential secrets of her history. Hitler, who had flouted the Versailles treaty with his annexation of Austria that past spring, now wanted Czechoslovakia's border region, the mountain barrier of the Sudetenland, with its military fortifications, its armament plants, its textile factories and mines. What do you think of the chancellor's newest mania? Tibor had written from Modena. Does he really believe Britain and France will stand idly by while he strips Central Europe's last democracy of all her defenses? It would be the end of free Czechoslovakia, we can be certain of that.

  From Matyas there was a different note of indignation, a schoolboy's protest against Hitler's geographic revisionism: How can he demand the "return" of the Sudetenland when it never belonged to Germany in the first place? Who does he think he's fooling? Every second-former knows that Czechoslovakia belonged to Austria-Hungary before the Great War. To that, Andras had written back that the Hungarian government itself was likely implicated in Hitler's plans, since Hungary would stand to regain its own lost territory if Germany took the Sudetenland; the word return was an incitement to anyone who felt that his country had been shortchanged at Versailles. But at least you've been paying attention in school, he wrote. Maybe you'll get your baccalaureate after all.

  The Paris papers revealed more as the situation unfolded: On the twelfth of September, in his closing speech at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Hitler brutalized the air with a fist and demanded justice for the millions of ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland; he refused to stand idly by and see them oppressed by the Czech president Benes and his government. A few days later, Chamberlain, who had never before set foot on an airplane, flew to Hitler's mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden to discuss what everyone was now calling the Sudeten crisis.

  "He should never have gone," Polaner said, over a glass of whiskey at the Blue Dove. "It's a humiliation, don't you see? This old man who's never been on a plane before, made to travel to the remotest corner of Germany for a meeting with the Fuhrer.

  It's a show of force on Hitler's part. The fact that Chamberlain went means he's frightened. I promise you, Hitler will see his advantage and take it."

  "If anyone's making a show of force, it's Chamberlain," Andras said. "He went to Berchtesgaden to make a point: If Hitler attacks Czechoslovakia, Britain and France will go to any length to bring him down. That's what this is about."

  But soon it became clear that Andras was wrong. The papers reported that Chamberlain had come out of the meeting with a list of demands from Hitler, and was now determined to persuade his own government, and France's, to meet the Fuhrer's conditions in short order. French editorials argued in favor of the sacrifice of the Sudetenland if it meant preserving the peace that had been won at such staggering cost in the Great War; the opposing view seemed to belong to a few fringe communist and socialist commentators. A few days later, envoys from the French and British governments presented President Benes with a proposal to strip the republic of its border regions, and demanded that the Czech government accept the plan without delay. Andras found himself spending all day combing the papers and listening to the red Bakelite wireless at Forestier's set-design studio, as if his constant attention might turn events in a different direction. Even Forestier put aside his design tools and mulled over the news with Andras. In response to the Anglo-French proposal, President Benes had submitted a measured and scholarly memorandum reminding France that it had sworn to defend Czechoslovakia if it were threatened; a few hours after the memo was transmitted, the British and French foreign ministers in Prague pulled Benes out of bed to insist he accept the proposal at once. Otherwise he would find himself facing Germany alone. The next day Andras and Monsieur Forestier listened in incredulous dismay as a commentator announced Benes's acceptance of the Anglo-French plan. The entire Czech cabinet had just resigned in protest. Chamberlain would meet with Hitler again on the twenty-second of September, this time in Bad Godesberg, to arrange the transfer of the Sudetenland.

  "Well, that's that!" Forestier said, his broad shoulders curling. "The last democracy of Cen
tral Europe kneels to Hitler at the urging of Britain and France. These are terrible times, my young Mr. Levi, terrible times."

  Andras had assumed then that the crisis was over, that a war had been averted, even if at a cruel price. But he arrived at Forestier's on the twenty-third of September to learn that the meeting in Bad Godesberg had yielded more demands still: Hitler wanted his troops to occupy the Sudetenland, and he required the Czech population of the area to vacate their homes and farms within a week, leaving behind everything they owned.