The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  ...

  Klara stood at the window with the newspaper in her hand, looking down into the rue de Sevigne. She had just read aloud a brief article about the actions the German government would take against the Jewish people in recompense for the catastrophic destruction of German property that resulted from the violence of 9 November. The newspapers were calling it the Night of Broken Glass. Andras walked up and down the length of the room, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. At the writing desk Elisabet opened a school notebook and scratched a series of figures with a pencil.

  "A billion reichsmarks," she said. "That's the amount of the fine against the Jews.

  And there are half a million Jews in Germany. That means each person has to pay two thousand reichsmarks, including children."

  The logic was astounding. He had tried and failed to grasp it. Grynszpan had shot vom Rath; vom Rath had died; November 9, the Night of Broken Glass, was supposed to have been the German people's natural reaction to the killing. Therefore the responsibility for the destruction of Jewish shops, and the burning of synagogues, and the ransacking of homes--to say nothing of the killing of ninety-one Jews and the arrest of thirty thousand more--lay with the Jews themselves, and so the Jews had to pay. In addition to the fines, all insurance payments for damaged property would go directly to the government. And now it was illegal for Jews to operate businesses in Germany. In Paris and New York and London there had been protests against the pogrom and its aftermath, but the French government had been strangely silent. Rosen said it was because von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, was supposed to visit Paris in December to sign a declaration of friendship between Germany and France. It all seemed a great ugly sham.

  From downstairs came the flutter and clang of the afternoon mail arriving through the slot. Elisabet got to her feet so quickly she overturned the chair, sending it backward into the fire screen, then ran downstairs to get the letters.

  "I used to have to bribe her with gingerbread to get the mail," Klara said as she righted the desk chair. "Now she won't let it sit for half a minute."

  Elisabet was a long time coming up again. When she reappeared, breathless and flushed, it was only to throw a few envelopes onto the writing desk before she ran off down the hall to her room. Klara sat at the desk and thumbed through the mail. One piece, a thin cream-colored envelope, seemed to catch her attention. She took her letter knife and opened it.

  "It's from Zoltan," she said, and scanned the single page. Her eyebrows drew together and she read more closely. "He and Edith are leaving in three weeks. He's writing to say goodbye."

  "Leaving for where?"

  "Budapest," she said. "This isn't the first I've heard of it. Marcelle said she'd heard a rumor that they were leaving--she told me last week when I met her at the Tuileries.

  Zoltan's been asked to manage the Royal Hungarian Opera. And Madame Novak wants to raise their child near her family." She rolled her lips inward and pressed a hand against her mouth.

  "Are you so unhappy to see him go, Klara?"

  She shook her head. "Not for the reason you're thinking. You know how I feel about Zoltan. He's a dear friend to me, an old friend. And a good man. He employed you, after all, when the Bernhardt could scarcely afford it." She went to sit beside Andras on the sofa and took his hand in her own. "But I'm not unhappy to see him go. I'm glad for him."

  "What's the matter, then?"

  "I'm envious," she said. "Terribly so. He and Edith can get on a train and go home. They can take the baby home to Edith's mother, to raise it with its cousins." She smoothed her gray skirt over her knees. "That pogrom in Germany," she said. "What if such a thing were to happen in Hungary? What if they were to arrest my brother? What would become of my mother?"

  "If anything were to happen in Hungary, I could go to Budapest and see about your mother."

  "But I couldn't go with you."

  "Perhaps we could find a way to bring your mother to France."

  "Even if we could, it would only be a temporary solution," she said. "To our larger problem, I mean."

  "What larger problem?"

  "You know the one. The problem of where we might live together. In the longer term, I mean. You know I can't go home to Hungary, and you can't stay here."

  "Why can't I?"

  "Your family," she said. "What if there's a war? You'd want to go home to them.

  I've thought about it a hundred times. You must know I thought about it a great deal in September. It was one of the reasons I couldn't bring myself to write to you. I couldn't see a way around it. I knew that if we decided to be together, I'd be keeping you from your family."

  "If I stay here it'll be my own decision," Andras said. "But if I have to go, I'll find a way to bring you with me. We'll see a lawyer. Isn't there some statute of limitations?"

  She shook her head. "I can still be arrested and tried for what I did. And even if I could go home, I couldn't leave Elisabet."

  "Of course not," Andras said. "But Elisabet has plans of her own."

  "Yes, that's just what I fear. She's still a child, Andras. She wears that engagement ring, but she doesn't really understand what it means."

  "Her fiance seems utterly sincere. I know he has the best intentions."

  "If that were the case, he might have consulted his parents before he started filling her head with ideas about marriage and America! He still hasn't told them he's engaged.

  Apparently they've got a girl in mind for him already, some beer heiress from Wisconsin.

  He's got no attachment to her, he says, but I'm not certain his parents will see it that way.

  At the very least, he might have thought to ask my permission before he gave Elisabet that ring."

  Andras smiled. "Is that how it's done? Do young men still ask permission?"

  She surrendered a smile in return. "Good young men," she said.

  And then he drew closer and bent to her ear. "I'd like to ask someone's permission, Klara," he said. "I'd like to write a letter to your mother."

  "And what if she says no?" she whispered back.

  "Then we'd have to elope."

  "But to where, darling?"

  "I don't care," he said, looking deep into the gray landscape of her eyes. "I want to be with you. That's all. I know it's impractical."

  "It's entirely impractical," she said. But she put her arms around his neck and raised her face to him, and he kissed her closed eyes, tasting a trace of salt. At that moment they heard Elisabet's step in the hallway; she appeared in the doorway of the sitting room in her green wool hat and coat. Andras and Klara drew away from each other and got to their feet.

  "Pardon me, disgusting adults," Elisabet said. "I'm going to the movies."

  "Listen, Elisabet," Andras said. "What if I were to marry your mother?"

  "Please," Klara said, raising a hand in caution. "This isn't the way we should talk about it."

  Elisabet tilted her head at Andras. "What did you say?"

  "Marry her," Andras said. "Make her my wife."

  "Do you mean that?" Elisabet said. "You want to marry her?"

  "I

  do."

  "And she'll have you?"

  A long moment passed during which Andras experienced terrible suspense. But then Klara took his hand in her own and pressed it, almost as though she were in pain.

  "He knows what I want," she said. "We want the same thing."

  Andras let out a breath. A flash flood of relief washed over Elisabet's features; her perpetually knotted forehead went smooth. She crossed the room and put her arms around Andras, then kissed her mother. "It's splendid," she said, with plain sincerity. Without another word she flung her purse over her shoulder and clattered down the stairs.

  "Splendid?" Klara said, in the reverberating silence that always followed Elisabet's departures. "I'm not certain what I was expecting, but that wasn't it."

  "She thinks it'll make things easier for her and Paul."

  Klara sighed. "I know. If
I marry you, she won't have to feel guilty about leaving me."

  "We'll wait, then, if you think it'll make a difference. We'll wait until she's finished with school."

  "That's another seven months."

  "Seven months," he said. "But then we'll have the rest of our lives."

  She nodded and took his hand. "Seven months."

  "Klara," he said. "Klara Morgenstern. Have you just agreed to marry me?"

  "Yes," she said. "Yes. When Elisabet's done with school. But that doesn't mean I'm letting her run off to America with that smooth-talking young man."

  "Seven months," he said.

  "And perhaps by then we'll solve our geographic problem."

  He held her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyelids.

  "Let's not worry about that now," he said. "Promise me you won't think about it."

  "I can't promise that, Andras. We'll have to think about it if we're to solve it."

  "We'll think about it later. Now I want to kiss you. May I?"

  In answer she put her arms around him, and he kissed her, wishing he had nothing else to do all day, all year, all his life. Then he pulled away and said, "I'm unprepared for this. I don't have anything for you. I don't have a ring."

  "A ring!" she said. "I don't want a ring."

  "You'll have one, though. I'll see to it. And I wasn't speaking lightly when I said I wanted to write to your mother."

  "That's a tricky business, as you know."

  "I wish we could speak to Jozsef," Andras said. "He could write to her, or enclose a letter from me inside one of his own."

  Klara pulled her lips together. "From what you've told me about his life, it hasn't come to seem any wiser to involve him in our situation."

  "If we're to be married, he'll have to know sometime. The Latin Quarter is a small place."

  She sighed. "I know. It's rather complicated." She went back to the sofa and opened the folded newspaper. "At least we've got some time to think about it. Seven months," she said. "Who knows what will happen by then? Shouldn't we all just get married at once? Shouldn't I be glad that my child might go across the ocean to America?

  If there's a war, she'll be safer there."

  That elusive ghost, safety. It had fled Hungary, had fled the halls of the Ecole Speciale, had fled Germany long before November 9. But as he sat down beside her and looked at the newspaper on her lap, he tasted the shock of it all over again. He followed the line of her hand to the front-page photograph: a man and woman in their nightclothes, standing in the street; a little boy between them, clutching what looked to be a Punch doll with a cone-shaped hat; and before them, shedding its violent light on them, a house on fire from its doorstep to its rafters. In the places where the fire had burned away carpets and flooring, wallpaper and plaster, he could see the structure of the house illuminated like the stripped bones of an animal. And he saw what an architect might see, what the man and woman and boy could not have seen as they stood in the street at that moment: that the main supports had already burned through, and in another moment the structure would fall in upon itself like a poorly built model, its beams crumbling to ash.

  PART THREE

  Departures and Arrivals

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A Dinner Party

  IN EARLY D ECEMBER, Madame Gerard threw a party for her own birthday.

  Klara received an invitation on a heavy ivory-colored card printed with gold ink; Andras was invited as her guest. The night of the party he put on an immaculate white shirt and a black silk tie, sprinkled and brushed his best dinner jacket, and polished the shoes Tibor had brought him the year before from Budapest. He told himself that there was nothing extraordinary about the fact that Marcelle had invited him; in fact, though, this was to be the first time he had seen her since her departure from the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt, and the first time he would appear in public as Klara's future husband, among people who might consider him her inferior. What he feared was not just what her friends might think of him but what she might think, seeing him for the first time among the members of her circle. Those choreographers, those dancers, those composers who sometimes made her gifts of their music: How could he appear in comparison to them except as a novice, an aspirant, a perhaps-someday-but-not-yet? He wondered if that was the effect Marcelle had intended. But Klara herself distracted him from his concerns; when he arrived at the rue de Sevigne that night her manner was light and intimate. They walked the chilly boulevards toward Marcelle's new apartment in the Eleventh, through streets that smelled of woodsmoke and approaching cold. It was difficult to believe it was nearly December, a year since they'd first met. Soon the skating ponds in the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne would be frozen solid once again.

  At Madame Gerard's they were received by a girl in a crisp white apron who took their coats and ushered them into a parquet-floored drawing room. The building belonged to the Belle Epoque, but Madame Gerard had decorated her new apartment in the modern style: in the drawing room there were low black leather sofas and African masks and vases of veined malachite on glass shelves. Grass-green draperies hung at the windows, and two steel tables stood at attention beside the sofas like slim-legged greyhounds. On the tables were a pair of Brancusis, two tense flames of black marble. All of it was the fruit of her recent success; she had conquered Paris in every role she'd played since The Mother, and had just received a series of enthusiastic reviews for her Antigone at the Theatre des Ambassadeurs, where Andras and Forestier had installed an elaborate surrealist set. Now Madame Gerard herself, dressed in a chartreuse silk gown, crossed the drawing room to welcome Andras and Klara. She kissed them both, and after they'd exchanged their greetings she led Andras to a black lacquered console table where drinks were being served.

  "Look how you've turned out," she said, and touched his lapel. "A gentleman after all. Evening dress suits you. I may have a terrible fit of jealousy before the night is over."

  "It was kind of you to invite me," Andras said. He heard the forced calm in his own voice, and he thought he saw the hint of a smile at the corner of Madame Gerard's mouth.

  "It was kind of you to indulge me on my birthday," she said. And then, more pointedly: "You'll enjoy the company, I believe. Our friend Monsieur Novak is here with his wife. Have you heard they're to return to Hungary?" She tilted her head toward a corner of the room, where Novak and his wife stood talking to a silver-haired man in a cravat. "I must say, he reacted with some surprise when I told him you and Klara would be here. I imagine you must know all about ...?"

  "Yes, I know all about," he said. "Though I'm sure you'd rather I hadn't. It would have entertained you, wouldn't it, to have been able to tell me yourself."

  "I've only ever looked out for your well-being," Madame Gerard said. "I warned you about getting involved with Klara. I must say I was astonished to hear that things had become so serious between you. I was certain she viewed you as a kind of entertainment."

  Andras felt the heat rising beneath his skin. "And is this your idea of an entertainment?" he said. "To invite people to your house and then insult them?"

  "Lower your voice, darling," Madame Gerard said. "You attribute too much cleverness to me. How is one to keep straight everyone else's romantic intrigues? If I'd invited only those of my friends whose connections were uncomplicated, I couldn't have invited anyone at all!"

  "I know you better than that," Andras said. "I don't think you do anything by mistake."

  "Well, I can see you've got me thoroughly romanticized," she said, obviously pleased. "What a charming young man you are."

  "And when exactly does Monsieur Novak depart for Hungary?" he asked.

  She gave her low dissonant laugh. "January," she said. "I can't imagine you'll be sad to see him go. Though I'm not certain how Klara will take it. They were very close, you understand." She handed him a glass of whiskey with ice, and turned her head toward Klara, who had taken a seat beside Novak on a low black sofa. "You mustn't
worry what people will say about the two of you, by the way--about your engagement, I mean.

  Everyone loves Klara's eccentricities. I find the situation irresistible myself. It's like a fairy tale! Look at you. She's turned you from a frog into a prince."

  "If that's all," he said, "I'll bring Klara a drink."

  "You'd better," Madame Gerard said. "In another moment he'll be obliged to get one for her." She turned her gaze again to the low black sofa, where Novak was explaining something to Klara in urgent tones. Klara shook her head, smiling sadly; Novak seemed to press his point, and Klara lowered her eyes.

  Andras got her a glass of wine and made his way through a cluster of dinner guests in evening dress; he brushed past Novak's wife, Edith, a tall, dark-haired woman in a velvet gown, redolent of jasmine perfume. The last time he'd seen her, almost a year earlier at the Sarah-Bernhardt, she'd handed him her bag while she searched her pockets for a handkerchief. She'd given him no more regard than if he'd been a hook on the wall.