The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  And that was the end of Klara's parents' hopes to bring her home. It was a lucky thing, her father's lawyer wrote, that they'd managed to get her out of the country when they had. If she'd stayed, there would have been another bloodbath.

  For the first two months of her time at Madame Nevitskaya's, Klara lay in a tiny dark room that looked out onto an airshaft. Every piece of bad news from Budapest seemed to push her farther toward the bottom of a well. She couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't stand to have anyone touch her. Sandor was dead. She would never see her parents or her brother again. Would never go home to Budapest. Would never again live in a place where everyone she passed on the street spoke Hungarian. Would never skate in the Varosliget or dance on the stage of the Operahaz, would never see any of her friends from school or eat a cone of chestnut paste as she walked the Danube strand on Margaret Island. Would never see any of the pretty things in her room, her leather-bound diaries and Herend vases and embroidered pillows, her Russian nesting dolls, her little menagerie of glass animals. She had even lost her name, would never again be Klara Hasz; she would forever be Claire Morgenstern, a name chosen for her by a lawyer.

  Every morning she woke to face the knowledge that it had all really happened, that she was a fugitive here at Madame Nevitskaya's in France. It seemed to have made her physically ill. She spent the first hours of each day hunched over a basin, vomiting and dry-heaving. Every time she stood she thought she would faint. One morning Madame Nevitskaya came into Klara's room and asked a series of mysterious-seeming questions.

  Did her breasts hurt? Did the smell of food make her sick? When was the last time she had bled? Later that day a doctor came and performed a painful and humiliating examination, after which he confirmed what Madame Nevitskaya had suspected: Klara was pregnant.

  For three days all she could do was stare at the dart of sky she could see from her bed. Clouds passed across it; a vee of brown birds flew through it; in the evening it darkened to indigo and then filled with the gold-shot black of Paris night. She watched it as Nevitskaya's maid, Masha, fed her chicken broth and bathed her forehead. She watched it as Nevitskaya explained that there was no need for Klara to endure the torture of carrying that man's child. The doctor could perform a simple operation after which Klara would no longer be pregnant. After Nevitskaya left her alone to contemplate her fate, she stared and stared at that changeable dart of sky, scarcely able to comprehend what she had learned. Pregnant. A simple operation. But Madame Nevitskaya didn't know the whole story; she and Sandor had been lovers for six months before he'd been killed. They had made love the very night of the attack. They had taken precautions, but she knew those precautions didn't always work. If she was pregnant, it was just as likely that the child was his.

  The thought was enough to get her out of bed. She told Madame Nevitskaya that she wouldn't have an operation, and why. Madame Nevitskaya, a stern, glossy-haired woman of fifty, took Klara in her arms and began to weep; she understood, she said, and would not try to dissuade her. Klara's parents, informed of her pregnancy and her plans, felt otherwise. They couldn't abide the idea that she might find herself raising that other person's child. In fact, her father was so strongly opposed to the idea that he threatened to cut Klara off altogether if she kept the child. What would she do, alone in Paris? She couldn't dance, not when she was pregnant, and not with an infant to care for; how would she support herself? Wasn't her situation difficult enough already?

  But Klara had made up her mind. She would not have that operation, nor would she give up the baby after she'd carried it. Once it had occurred to her that the child might be Sandor's, the idea began to take on the weight of a certainty. Let her father cut her off.

  She would work; she knew what she could do. She went to Madame Nevitskaya and begged to be allowed to teach a few classes of beginning students. She could do it until her pregnancy showed, and she could do it once she'd recovered from the birth. If Nevitskaya would have her as an instructor, it would save her life and the child's.

  Nevitskaya would. She gave Klara a class of seven-year-olds and bought her the black practice dress worn by all the teachers at the school. And soon Klara began to live again. Her appetite came back and she gained weight. Her dizziness disappeared. She found she could sleep at night. Sandor's child, she thought; not that other's. She went to a barber shop and got her hair cut short. She bought a sack dress of the kind that was fashionable then, a dress she could wear until late in the pregnancy. She bought a new leather-bound diary. Every day she went to the ballet school and taught her class of twenty little girls. When she couldn't teach anymore, she begged Masha to let her help with the work around the house. Masha showed her how to clean, how to cook, how to wash; she taught her to navigate the market and the shops. When, in her sixth month, Klara noticed the vendors glancing at her belly and at her bare left hand, she bought a brass band she wore on her third finger like a wedding ring. She bought it as a convenience, but after a time it came to seem as though it really were a wedding ring; she began to feel as if she were married to Sandor Goldstein.

  As her ninth month approached, she began to have vivid dreams about Sandor.

  Not the nightmares she'd had in her first weeks in Paris--Sandor lying in the alley, his eyes open to the sky--but dreams in which they were doing ordinary things together, working on a difficult lift or arguing over the answer to some arithmetic problem or wrestling in the cloakroom of the Operahaz. In one dream he was thirteen, stealing sweets with her at the market. In another he was younger still, a thin-armed boy teaching her to dive at Palatinus Strand. She thought of him when the first contractions came on; she thought of him when the water rushed out of her. It was Sandor she cried for when the pain grew long and deep inside her, a white-hot stream of fire threatening to cleave her.

  When she woke after the cesarean she put out her arms to receive his child.

  But it wasn't his child at all, of course. It was Elisabet.

  When she'd finished her story they sat silent by the fire, Andras on the footstool and Klara in the vermilion chair, her feet tucked under her skirt. The tea had grown cold in their cups. Outside, a hard wind had begun to rattle the trees. Andras got up and went to the window, looked down at the entrance of the College de France, at its ragged lace collar of clochards.

  "Zoltan Novak knows about this," Andras said.

  "He knows the basic facts. He's the only one in France who does. Madame Nevitskaya died some time ago."

  "You told him so he'd understand why you couldn't love him."

  "We were very close, Zoltan and I. I wanted him to know."

  "Not even Elisabet knows," Andras said, smoothing the rim of his cup with his thumb. "She believes she's the child of someone you loved."

  "Yes," Klara said. "It couldn't have helped her to know the truth."

  "And now you've told me. You've told me so I'd understand what happened at Nice. You fell in love once, with Sandor Goldstein, and you can't love anyone else.

  Madame Gerard guessed as much--she told me a long time ago that you were in love with a man who'd died."

  Klara gave a quiet sigh. "I did love Sandor," she said. "I adored him. But it's romantic nonsense to suggest that what I felt for him would keep me from falling in love again."

  "What happened at Nice, then?" Andras said. "What made you turn away?"

  She shook her head and put her cheek into her hand. "I was frightened, I suppose.

  I saw what it might be like to have a life with you. For the first time that seemed possible.

  But there were all the terrible things I hadn't told you. You didn't know I had shot and killed a man, or that I was a fugitive from justice. You didn't know I'd been raped. You didn't know how damaged I was."

  "How could it have done anything but make me feel closer to you?"

  She came to stand beside him at the window, her face flushed and damp, raw-looking in the dim light. "You're a young man," she said. "You can love someone whose life is simple. You
don't need any of this. I was certain you'd see the situation that way as soon as I told you. I was certain I'd seem a ruin of a person."

  Last December she'd stood in just the same place with a cup of tea shivering in her hands. You have some too, she'd said, offering the cup. Te.

  "Klara," he said. "You're mistaken. I wouldn't trade your complication for anyone else's simplicity. Do you understand?"

  She raised her eyes to him. "It's difficult to believe."

  "Try," he said, and drew her close so he could breathe the warm scent of her scalp, the darkness of her hair. Here in his arms was the girl who had lived in the house near the Varosliget, the young dancer who had loved Sandor Goldstein, the woman who loved him now. He could almost see inside her that unnameable thing that had remained the same through all of it: her I, her very life. It seemed so small, a mustard seed with one rootlet shot deep into the earth, strong and fragile at once. But it was all there needed to be. It was everything. She had given it to him, and now he held it in his hands.

  They spent that night together on the rue des Ecoles. In the morning they washed and dressed in the blue chill of Andras's room, and then walked together to the rue de Sevigne. It was the seventh of November, a cold gray morning feathered with frost.

  Andras went inside with her to light the coal stove in the studio. He hadn't entered that place, her own place, for two months. It was quiet in the expectant way of classrooms; it smelled of ballet shoes and rosin, like the Budapest studio she'd described. In a corner stood the drawing table she had given him for his birthday, draped to keep out the dust.

  She went to it and pulled the sheet free.

  "I've kept it, just as you asked," she said.

  Andras took the sheet from her and wrapped it around them both. He drew her so close he could feel her hipbones hard against his own, her ribcage pressing against his ribcage as they breathed. He draped the end of the sheet over their heads so they stood shrouded together in a corner of the studio. In the white privacy of that tent he lifted her chin with one finger and kissed her. She drew the sheet tighter around them.

  "Let's never come out," he said. "Let's stay here always."

  He bent to kiss her again, full of the certainty that nothing could make him move from that place--not hunger, nor exhaustion, nor pain, nor fear, nor war.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Dead Man

  THE NEWS CAME to Andras at studio. Though he was half blind with exhaustion after his night with Klara, he had to go to school; he had a critique that day. It was an emulation project: he'd had to design a single-use space in the style of a contemporary architect. He had designed an architecture studio after Pierre Charreau, modeling it upon the doctor's house on the rue Saint-Guillaume: a three-level building composed of glass block and steel, flooded with diffuse light all day and glowing from inside at night. Everyone had arrived early to pin their designs to the walls; once Andras had found a place for his drawings, he took a stool from his worktable and sat with the older students around a paint-spattered radio. They were listening to the news, expecting nothing but the usual panchromium of worries.

  It was Rosen who caught it first; he turned up the volume so everyone could hear.

  The German ambassador had just been shot. No, not the ambassador, an embassy official.

  A secretary of legation, whatever that was. Ernst Eduard vom Rath. Twenty-nine years old. He'd been shot by a child. A child? That couldn't be right. A youngster. A boy of seventeen. A Jewish boy. A German-Jewish boy of Polish extraction. He had shot the official to avenge the deportation of twelve thousand Jews from Germany.

  "Oh, God," Ben Yakov said, pulling his hands through his pomaded hair. "He's a dead man."

  Everyone crowded closer. Had the embassy official been killed, or was he still alive? The answer came a moment later: He had been shot four times in the abdomen; he was undergoing surgery at the Alma Clinic on rue de l'Universite, not ten minutes from the Ecole Speciale. It was rumored that Hitler was sending his personal physician from Berlin, along with the director of the Surgical Clinic of the University of Munich. The assailant, Gruenspan or Grinspun, was being held at an undisclosed location.

  "Sending his personal physician!" Rosen said. "I'm sure he is. Sending him with a nice big capsule of arsenic for their man."

  "What do you mean?" someone demanded.

  "Vom Rath has to die for Germany," Rosen said. "Once he does, they can do whatever they want to the Jews."

  "They'd never kill their own man."

  "Of course they would."

  "They won't have to," another student said. "The man's been shot four times."

  Polaner had stepped away from the crowd near the radio and had gone to smoke a cigarette by the window. Andras went over and looked down into the courtyard, where two fifth-year students were hanging a complicated wooden mobile from a tree. Polaner cracked the window open and blew a line of smoke out into the chilly air.

  "I knew him," he said. "Not the Jewish boy. The other."

  "Vom Rath?" Andras said. "How?"

  Polaner glanced up at Andras and then looked away. He tapped his ash onto the windowsill outside, where it circled for a moment and then scattered. "There's a certain bar I used to go to," Polaner said. "He used to go, too."

  Andras nodded in silence.

  "Shot," Polaner said. "By a seventeen-year-old Jewish kid. Vom Rath, of all people."

  Vago came in at that moment and turned off the radio, and everyone began to take their seats for the brief lecture he'd give before the critique. Andras sat on his wooden stool only half listening, scratching a box into the surface of the studio desk with the metal clip of his pencil. It was all too much, what Klara had told him the night before and what had happened at the German Embassy. In his mind they became one: Klara and the Polish-German teenager, both violated, both holding guns in trembling hands, both firing, both condemned. Nazi doctors hastened toward Paris to save or kill a man. And the Polish-German boy was in jail somewhere, waiting to learn if he was a murderer or not.

  Andras's drawing had slipped one of its pins and hung askew from the wall. He looked at it and thought, That's right. At that moment, everything seemed to hang at an angle by a single pin: not just houses, but whole cities, countries, peoples. He wished he could quiet the din in his mind. He wanted to be in the smooth white bed at Klara's house, in her white bedroom, in the sheets that smelled like her body. But there was Vago now, taking Andras's drawing by its corner and repinning it to the wall. There was the class gathering around. It was time for his critique. He made himself get up from the table and stand beside his drawing while they discussed it. It was only afterward, when everyone was patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand, that he realized it had been a success.

  "Vom Rath didn't hate the Jews," Polaner said. "He was a Party member, of course, but he loathed what was going on in Germany. That's why he came to France: He wanted to get away. At least that was what he told me."

  Two days had passed; Ernst vom Rath had died that afternoon at the Alma Clinic.

  Hitler's doctors had come, but they had deferred to the French doctors. According to the evening news broadcast, vom Rath had died of complications from damage to his spleen.

  A ceremony would be held at the German Lutheran Church that Saturday.

  Andras and Polaner had gone to the Blue Dove for a glass of whiskey, but they'd discovered they were short on cash. It was the end of the month; not even the pooled contents of their pockets would buy a single drink. So they told the waiter they would order in a few minutes, and then they sat talking, hoping they could pass half an hour in that warm room before they'd be asked to leave. After a while the waiter brought their usual whiskey and water. When they protested that they couldn't pay, the waiter twisted one end of his moustache and said, "Next time I'll charge you double."

  "How did you meet him?" Andras asked Polaner.

  Polaner shrugged. "Someone introduced us. He bought me a drink. We talked. He was int
elligent and well read. I liked him."

  "But when you learned who he was--"

  "What would you have had me do?" Polaner said. "Walk away? Would you have wanted him to do the same to me?"

  "But how could you sit there and speak to a Nazi? Especially after what happened last winter?"

  "He didn't do that to me. He wouldn't have done it. I told you."

  "That's what he said, at least. But he may have had other motives."

  "For God's sake," Polaner said. "Can't you leave it alone? A man I knew just died.

  I'm trying to take it in. Isn't that enough for now?"

  "I'm sorry," Andras said.

  Polaner laid his folded hands on the table and rested his chin upon them. "Ben Yakov was right," he said. "They'll make an example of that boy. Grynszpan. They'll have him extradited and then kill him in some spectacular way."

  "They can't. The world is watching them."

  "All the better, as far as they're concerned."