The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  Klara had been one of his earliest pupils. She had started with him when she was eleven. He had picked her out of a class he'd glimpsed through a window as he walked through the Jewish Quarter; he went straight into the studio, took her by the hand from among her classmates, told the instructress that he was a friend of the family and that there was an urgent matter at home. Outside, he explained to Klara that he was a ballet teacher from St. Petersburg, that he had taken note of her talent and wanted to see her dance. Then he walked her to the Royal Ballet School on Andrassy ut, a third-floor honeycomb of practice studios much shabbier than the school Klara had just left behind.

  The floors were gray with age, the pianos scarred, the walls devoid of even a single Degas print, the air redolent of feet and shoe satin and rosin. No classes were meeting that day; the studios stood empty of everything but the strange humming resonance that hovered in rooms whose natural state was to be filled with music and dancers. Romankov took Klara to one of the smaller studios and sat down at the piano. As he pounded out a minuet she danced her butterfly piece from the previous year's recital. The music was wrong but the tempo was right; as she danced, she had the sense that something fateful was taking place. When she'd finished, Romankov clapped his hands and made her take a bow. She was splendid for her age, he said, and not too old for him to correct what was wrong with her technique. She must begin her training immediately; this was the school where she would become a ballerina. He must speak to her parents that very day.

  Eleven-year-old Klara, flattered by his vision of her future, took him home to her parents' villa on Benczur utca. In the sitting room with its salmon-colored sofas, Romankov announced to Klara's startled mother that her daughter was wasting her time at the studio on Wesselenyi utca and must enroll at the Royal Ballet School at once. It was possible that Klara had a brilliant future in ballet, but he must undo the damage that her current teacher had done. He showed Mrs. Hasz the mannered curl of Klara's hand, the exaggerated flatness of her fifth position, the jerky exactitude of her port de bras; then he smoothed her hands into a more childlike curl, made her stand in a looser fifth, took her arms by the wrists and floated them through the positions as though through water.

  This was how a dancer should look, how she should move. He could train her to do this, and if she excelled she would have a place in the Royal Ballet.

  Klara's mother, who, through an accident of fate and love, had found herself extracted from rural oblivion in Kaba and placed at the center of the most exalted Jewish social circle of Budapest, had never imagined that Klara might someday become a professional dancer; she had imagined lives of ease and comfort for her children. Of course Klara studied ballet, grace being a necessary attribute for young ladies of her social position. But a career as a ballerina was out of the question. She thanked Romankov for his interest and wished him well with his new position at the Royal Ballet School; she would speak to Klara's father that evening. Once she had sent him away she took Klara upstairs to the nursery and explained to her why she could not study ballet with the nice Russian man. Dancing was a pleasant pastime for a child, not something one did in front of audiences for money. Professional dancers led lives of poverty, deprivation, and exploitation. They rarely married, and when they did, their marriages ended unhappily. When Klara was grown she would be a wife and mother. If she wanted to dance she could give balls for her friends, as her anya and apa did.

  Klara nodded and agreed, because she loved her mother. But at eleven years old she already knew she would be a dancer. She'd known it since her brother had taken her to see La Cendrillon at the Operahaz when she was five. The next time her governess dropped her off for a dancing lesson at the school on Wesselenyi utca, she ran the seven blocks to the Royal Ballet School on Andrassy ut and asked one of the dancers there where she might find the tall red-bearded gentleman. The girl took her to a studio at the end of a hallway, where Romankov was just preparing to teach an intermediate lesson.

  He didn't seem at all surprised to see Klara; he made a place for her at the practice barre between two other children, and, in his Russian-accented baritone, led them through a series of difficult exercises. At the end of class Klara returned to the other ballet school in time to meet her governess, to whom she mentioned nothing of her adventure. It was three weeks before Klara's parents discovered her defection from the studio on Wesselenyi utca. By then it was too late: Klara had become a devotee of Romankov and the Royal Ballet School. Klara's indulgent father convinced her mother that there could be no real danger of their daughter's ending up on the stage; the school was merely a more rigorous version of the one she'd attended before. He'd inquired into Romankov's professional history, and there could be no denying that the man was an exceptionally gifted teacher. To have his daughter studying under that famous ballet master was an honor that touched Tamas Hasz's sense of bourgeois pride and confirmed his paternal prejudices.

  Of the twenty children that comprised the Royal Ballet School's beginning class, seventeen were girls and three were boys. One of the boys was a tall dark-haired child named Sandor Goldstein. He was the son of a carpenter and had a perpetual smell of fresh-cut wood about him. Romankov had discovered Sandor Goldstein not in a dance class but at the pool at Palatinus Strand, where Goldstein had been practicing acrobatic dives with a group of friends. At twelve years old he could do a handstand on the edge of the board and push himself off, then flip backward to enter the water headfirst. At his school he'd won the gymnastics medal three years in a row. When Romankov proposed taking him on as a student, Goldstein had denounced ballet as a pursuit for girls.

  Romankov had responded by engaging one of the male dancers of the Hungarian Royal Ballet to meet Goldstein on his way home from school, lift him overhead like a barbell, and run through the streets with him until Goldstein begged to be put down. The next day Goldstein enrolled in Romankov's beginning class, and by the time he was thirteen and Klara twelve, they were both performing children's roles with the Royal Ballet.

  To Klara, Sandor was brother, friend, co-conspirator. He taught her to send Romankov into a fury by dancing half a beat behind the music. He introduced her to delicacies she'd never tried: the savory dry end of a Debrecen sausage; the crystalline scrapings of the sugared-nuts kettle, which could be bought for half a filler at the end of the day; the tiny sour apples that were meant for jelly but that made for fine eating if you didn't eat too many. And at the great market on Vamhaz korut he taught her how to steal.

  While Klara showed off pirouettes for the candy vendor, Sandor nicked a handful of peach-pit candy for both of them. He tipped tiny Russian dolls into his cap, looped embroidered kerchiefs onto his smallest finger, plucked pastries from the market baskets of women haggling over fruit and vegetables. Klara invited him to lunch at her parents'

  house, where he soon became a favorite. Her father talked to him as though he were a full-grown gentleman, her mother fed him pink-iced chocolates, and her brother dressed him in a military jacket and taught him to shoot imaginary Serbs.

  When they had both attained the necessary strength, Romankov made Klara and Sandor dancing partners. He taught Sandor to lift Klara with no sign of effort, to make her seem light as a reed. He taught them to become a single dancer in two bodies, to listen to the rhythm of each other's breath, the flow of blood in each other's veins. He made them study anatomy textbooks together and tested them on musculature and bone structure. He took them to see dissections at the medical school. Five times a week they performed with the Royal Ballet. By the time she was thirteen, Klara had been a moth, a sylph, a sugarplum, a member of a swan court, a lady-in-waiting, a mountain stream, a moonbeam, a doe. Her parents had resigned themselves to her appearing on the stage; her growing fame had earned them a certain prestige among their friends. When she turned fourteen and Sandor fifteen they began dancing principal roles, edging out dancers who were four and five years older. Great ballet masters from Paris and Petrograd and London came to see them. They danced
for the dispossessed royalty of Europe and for the heirs of French and American fortunes. And amid the confusion of auditions and practices and costume fittings and performances, the inevitable happened: They fell in love.

  A year later, in the spring of 1921, it came to the attention of Admiral Miklos Horthy that the star dancers of his kingless kingdom were two Jewish children who had been taught to dance by a White Russian emigre. Of course, no law forbade Jews from becoming dancers; no quota existed in the Royal Ballet Company to mirror the numerus clausus that kept Jews in universities and public positions to a reasonable six percent. But the matter offended Horthy's sense of nationalism. Hungarian Jews might be Magyarized, but they were not really Hungarian. They might participate in the economic and civic life of the country, but they ought not stand as shining examples of Magyar achievement on the stages of the world. And that was what these children had been asked to do; that was why the minister of culture had brought the matter to Horthy's attention. They'd been invited to perform in seventeen cities that spring, and had applied for the necessary visas.

  Horthy couldn't be troubled with the matter beyond forming the opinion that something ought to be done. He told the minister of culture to handle it as he saw fit. The minister of culture assigned the problem to an undersecretary who was known for his ambition and his unambiguous feelings toward Jews. This man, Madarasz, lost no time in carrying out his assignment. First he forbade the visa office to grant exit passes to the two dancers. Then he assigned two police officers, known members of the right-wing Arrow Cross Party, to carry out a regular watch over the dancers' comings and goings. Klara and Sandor never guessed that the policemen they saw every night in the alley had anything to do with the troubles they were having at the visa office; the men scarcely seemed to notice them. Usually the policemen were arguing. Invariably they were drunk: They had an army canteen they passed back and forth between them. No matter how late Klara and Sandor stayed at the Operahaz--and sometimes they stayed until twelve thirty or one o'clock, because the theater was the only place where they could be alone--the men were always there. After a week or so of listening to their arguments, Sandor learned their names: Lajos was the tall block-jawed one; Gaspar was the one who looked like a bulldog. Sandor got into the habit of waving to them in greeting. The policemen never waved back, of course; they would give stony stares as Klara and Sandor passed.

  A month went by and the men were still there, their presence as much a mystery as ever. But by that time they'd come to seem part of the neighborhood furniture, the fabric of Sandor and Klara's everyday lives. The situation might have gone on indefinitely, or at least until the Ministry of Culture had lost interest, had not the policemen themselves tired of their endless watch. Boredom and drink made their silence oppressive. They started calling out to Klara and Sandor: Hey, lovers. Hey, darlings. How does she taste? Can we have some? Do dancer boys have anything down there? Does he know what to do with it, sugar? Sandor would take Klara's arm and hurry her along, but she could feel him shaking with anger as the men's taunts followed them down the street.

  One night the man called Gaspar approached them, stinking of cigarettes and liquor. Klara remembered thinking that the leather strap across his chest looked like the kind of strap teachers used to beat unruly children at school. He drew his baton from its holster and tapped it against his leg.

  "What are you waiting for?" the man called Lajos goaded him.

  Gaspar took the baton and slipped it under the hem of Klara's dress; in one swift motion he raised the hem as high as her head, exposing her to the waist for an instant.

  "There you go," called Gaspar to Lajos. "Now you've seen it."

  Before Klara knew what was happening, Sandor had stepped forward and grabbed the free end of the baton; as he tried to twist it away, the officer held fast to the other end.

  Sandor kicked the man in the knee, making him howl in pain. The officer wrenched the baton away and struck Sandor in the head. Sandor fell to his knees. He raised his arms, and the officer began to kick him in the stomach. For a moment Klara was caught in a paralysis of horror; she couldn't understand what was happening or why. She screamed for the man to stop, she tried to pull him off Sandor. But the other officer, Lajos, caught her by the arm and wrenched her away. He dragged her into a recess of the alley, where he forced her down onto the paving stones and pushed her skirt up around her waist. He stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth, put a gun under her chin, and did what he did to her.

  The pain of it had a kind of clarifying power. She scuttled her fingers across the pavement, looking for what she knew was there: the baton, cold and smooth against the cobblestones. He'd dropped it when he'd bent to unbutton his pants. Now she closed her hand around it and struck him in the temple. When he yelped and put a hand to his head, she kicked him in the chest as hard as she could. He reeled back against the opposite wall of the alcove, hit his head against the base of the wall, and went still. At that moment, from the alley where Sandor and the officer had been struggling, there came a sharp percussive crack. The sound seemed to fly into Klara's brain and explode outward.

  Then a terrible silence.

  She got to her knees and crawled out of the alcove, toward the place where one male form crouched over another. Sandor lay on his back with his eyes open toward the sky. The bulldog-faced officer knelt beside him, one hand on Sandor's chest. The officer was crying, telling the boy to get up, damn him, get up. He called the boy a rotten piece of filth. His hand came away from Sandor's chest covered in blood. From the pavement he retrieved the gun he'd dropped and turned it upon Klara; its barrel caught the light and quavered in the dim cave of the alley. Klara edged back into the alcove where the first officer lay. She went to her knees, searching for the man's revolver; she'd heard it clatter to the pavement when she'd knocked him away. There it was, cold and heavy on the ground. She picked it up in one hand and tried to hold it still against her leg. The officer who had shot Sandor advanced toward her, weeping. If she hadn't seen him holding the gun a moment earlier, he might have seemed to be approaching her in supplication. Now she looked at Sandor on the ground and felt the weight of the weapon in her own hand, the same gun that the officer called Lajos had pushed against the hollow of her throat.

  She raised it and held it steady.

  A second explosion. The man stumbled back and fell; afterward, a deep stillness.

  It was the ache of the recoil in her shoulder that made her know that it had happened: She had fired the gun, had shot a man. From Andrassy ut came a woman's shout. Farther away, a siren sent up its two-note howl. She came out of the alcove with the gun in her hand and approached the officer she had shot. He had fallen backward onto the pavement, one arm flung over his head. From the alcove came a groan and a word she couldn't understand. The other officer had gotten to his hands and knees. He saw the revolver in her hand and the man dead on the street. In three days he himself would be dead of his head injury, but not before he'd revealed the identity of his partner's killer and his own. The distant sirens grew closer; Klara dropped the gun and ran.

  She had killed one officer and fatally wounded another. Those were the facts.

  That she had been raped by one of those officers could never be proved in court. All the witnesses were dead, and within days Klara's bruises and abrasions had disappeared. By that time, at the urging of her father's lawyer, she'd been spirited over the border into Austria, and from there into Germany, and from Germany into France. The city of Paris would be her refuge, the famed ballet teacher Olga Nevitskaya, a cousin of Romankov's, her protector. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. She would live at Nevitskaya's only as long as it took her parents to determine who might be bribed, or how her safety might otherwise be guaranteed. But before two weeks had passed, the peril of Klara's situation became clear. She had been accused of murder. The gravity of the crime assured that she would be tried as an adult. Her father's lawyer believed there could be no guarantee of success in an argument o
f self-defense; the police had determined that the man she'd killed had been unarmed when she'd shot him. Of course he'd had a gun; he'd shot Sandor with it a few moments earlier. But the other officer, the one who had witnessed the shooting, had testified that his partner had dropped the gun before he had approached Klara. The testimony had been confirmed by material evidence: the gun had been found beside Sandor's body, ten feet away from the fallen officer.

  To make matters worse, it turned out that the man Klara had shot had been a war hero. He had saved fifteen members of his company in the battle of Kovel, had received an official commendation from the Emperor. And if that were not enough to turn any judge's favor against Klara, it emerged--or the police claimed--that the right-wing members of their department had recently received threatening messages from Gesher Zahav, a Zionist organization to which Klara and Sandor had been linked. Three times in the past month the dancers had been seen coming and going from the organization's headquarters on Dohany utca; never mind that what they'd been doing was attending Sunday night dances, not plotting the murder of police operatives. The fact that Klara had disappeared was considered to be a confirmation of her guilt, of her position as an instrument of Gesher Zahav's plot. News of it was all over town; every paper in Budapest had run a front-page article about the young Jewish dancer who had murdered a war hero.