The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
"I hear you're interested in mathematics," Andras said, speaking to the top of Elisabet's lowered head.
She raised her eyes. "Did my mother tell you that?"
"No, Madame Gerard did. She said you won a competition."
"Anyone can do high-school mathematics."
"Do you think you'll want to study it in college?"
Elisabet shrugged. "If I go to college."
"Darling, you can't live on spaetzle," Madame Morgenstern said quietly, looking at Elisabet's plate. "You used to like stuffed cabbage."
"It's cruel to eat meat," Elisabet said, and leveled her eyes at Andras. "I've seen how they butcher cows. They stick a knife in the neck and draw it downwards, like this, and the blood pours out. My biology class took a trip to a shochet. It's barbaric."
"Not really," Andras said. "My brothers and I used to know the kosher butcher in our town. He was a friend of our father's, and he was quite gentle with the animals."
Elisabet watched him intently. "And can you explain to me how you gently butcher a cow?" she said. "What did he do? Pet them to death?"
"He used the traditional method," Andras said, his tone sharper than he'd intended. "One quick cut across the neck. It couldn't have hurt them for more than a second."
Madame Morgenstern set her silverware down and put a napkin to her mouth as if she felt ill, and Elisabet's expression became slyly triumphant. Mrs. Apfel stood in the doorway holding a water pitcher, waiting to see what would happen next.
"Go on," Elisabet said. "What did he do then, after he made the cut?"
"I think we're finished with this subject," Andras said.
"No, please. I'd like to hear the rest, now that you've started."
"Elisabet, that's enough," Madame Morgenstern said.
"But the conversation's just getting interesting."
"I said it's enough."
Elisabet crumpled her napkin and threw it onto the table. "I'm finished," she said.
"You can sit here with your guest and eat meat. I'm going to the cinema with Marthe."
She pushed her chair back and stood, nearly upsetting Mrs. Apfel and the water pitcher, then went off down the hall and knocked around in a distant room. A few moments later her heavy footsteps echoed on the stairs. The door of the dance studio slammed and its mullioned window jingled.
At the dining table, Madame Morgenstern lowered her forehead onto her palm. "I apologize, Monsieur Levi," she said.
"No, please," he said. "It's fine." In fact, he wasn't at all sorry to have been left alone with Madame Morgenstern. "Don't be upset on my account," he said. "That was a terrible topic of conversation. I apologize."
"There's no need," Madame Morgenstern said. "Elisabet is impossible at times, that's all. I can't do anything with her once she's decided she's angry at me."
"Why should she be angry at you?"
She gave a half smile and shrugged. "It's complicated, I'm afraid. She's a sixteen-year-old girl. I'm her mother. She doesn't like me to have anything to do with her social affairs. And I mustn't remind her that we're Hungarian, either. She considers Hungarians an unenlightened people."
"I've felt that way, too, at times," Andras said. "I've spent a lot of time lately struggling to be French."
"Your French is excellent, as it turns out."
"No, it's terrible. And I'm afraid I did nothing to dispel your daughter's notion that Magyars are barbarians."
Madame Morgenstern hid a smile behind her hand. "You were rather quick with that business about the butcher," she said.
"I'm sorry," Andras said, but he'd started to laugh. "I don't think I've ever spoken about that over lunch."
"So you really did know the butcher in your town," she said.
"I did. And I saw him at his work. But Elisabet was right, I'm afraid--it was awful!"
"You must have grown up--where? Somewhere in the countryside?"
"Konyar," he said. "Near Debrecen."
"Konyar? That's not twenty kilometers from Kaba, where my mother was born."
A shade passed over her features and was gone.
"Your mother," he said. "But she doesn't live there anymore?"
"No," Madame Morgenstern said. "She lives in Budapest." She fell silent for a moment, then turned the conversation back to Andras's history. "So you're a Hajdu, too.
A flatlands boy."
"That's right," he said. "My father owns a lumberyard in Konyar." So she wouldn't talk about it, wouldn't discuss the subject of her family. He had been on the verge of mentioning the letter--of saying I've met your mother--but the moment had passed now, and there was a kind of relief in the prospect of talking about Konyar. Ever since he'd arrived in Paris and had mastered enough French to answer questions about his origins, he'd been telling people he was from Budapest. What would anyone have known of Konyar? And to those who would have known, like Jozsef Hasz or Pierre Vago, Konyar meant a small and backward place, a town you were lucky to have escaped. Even the name sounded ridiculous--the punchline of a bawdy joke, the sound of a jumping jack springing from a box. But he really was from Konyar, from that dirt-floored house beside the railroad tracks.
"My father's something of a celebrity in town, to tell the truth," Andras said.
"Indeed! What is he known for?"
"His terrible luck," Andras said. And then, feeling suddenly brave: "Shall I tell you his story, the way they tell it at home?"
"By all means," she said, and folded her hands in anticipation.
So he told her the story just as he'd always heard it: Before his father had owned the lumberyard, he had suffered a string of misfortunes that had earned him the nickname of Lucky Bela. His own father had fallen ill while Bela was at rabbinical school in Prague, and had died as soon as he returned home. The vineyard he inherited had succumbed to blight. His first wife had died in childbirth, along with the baby, a girl; not long after, his house had burned to the ground. All three of his brothers were killed in the Great War, and his mother had given in to grief and drowned herself in the Tisza. At thirty he was a ruined man, penniless, his family dead. For a time he lived on the charity of the Jews of Konyar, sleeping in the Orthodox shul at night and eating what they left for him. Then, at the end of a drought summer, a famous Ukrainian miracle rabbi arrived from across the border and set up temporary quarters in the shul. He studied Torah with the local men, settled disputes, officiated at weddings, granted divorces, prayed for rain, danced in the courtyard with his disciples. One morning at dawn he came upon Andras's father sleeping in the sanctuary. He'd heard the story of this unfortunate, this man whom all the village said must be suffering from a curse; they seemed to regard him with a kind of gratitude, as if he'd drawn the attention of the evil eye away from the rest of them. The rabbi roused Bela with a benediction, and Bela looked up in speechless fear. The rabbi was a gaunt man with an ice-white beard; his eyebrows stood out from the curve of his forehead like lifted wings, his eyes dark and liquid beneath them.
"Listen to me, Bela Levi," the rabbi whispered in the half-light of the sanctuary.
"There's nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best. You must fast for two days and go to the ritual bath, then accept the first offer of work you receive."
Even if Lucky Bela had been a believer in miracles, his misfortunes would have made him a skeptic. "I'm too hungry to fast," he said.
"Practice at hunger makes the fast easier," the rabbi said.
"How do you know there's not a curse on me?"
"I try not to wonder how I know. Certain things I just know." And the rabbi made another blessing over Bela and left him alone in the sanctuary.
What more did Lucky Bela have to lose? He fasted for two days and bathed in the river at night. The next morning he wandered toward the railroad tracks, faint with hunger, and picked an apple from a stunted tree beside a white brick cottage. The proprietor of the lumberyard, an Orthodox Jew, stepped out of the cottage and asked Bela what he thought he was doing.
"There's no work for you here," the man said, gently, "but come inside and eat."
The man's name was Zindel Kohn. His wife, Gitta, set bread and cheese before Lucky Bela. With Zindel and Gitta and their five small children, Lucky Bela ate; as he did, he allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past. He could not have imagined that this house would become his own house, that his own children would eat bread and cheese at this very table. But by the end of the afternoon he had a job: The boy who worked the mechanical saw at Zindel Kohn's lumberyard had decided to become a disciple of the Ukrainian rabbi. He had left that morning without notice.
Six years later, when Zindel Kohn and his family moved to Debrecen, Lucky Bela took over the lumberyard. He married a black-haired girl named Flora who bore him three sons, and by the time the oldest was ten, Bela had earned enough money to buy the lumberyard outright. He did a fine business; people in Konyar needed building materials and firewood in every season. Before long, hardly anyone in Konyar remembered that Lucky Bela's nickname had been given in irony. The history might have been allowed to fade altogether had it not been for the return of the Ukrainian rabbi; this was at the height of the worldwide depression, just before the High Holidays. The rabbi spent an evening at Lucky Bela's house and asked if he might tell his story in synagogue. It might help the Jews of Konyar, he said, to be reminded of what God would do for his children if they refused to capitulate to despair. Lucky Bela consented. The rabbi told the story, and the Jews of Konyar listened. Though Bela insisted his good fortune was due entirely to the generosity of others, people began to regard him as a kind of holy figure. They touched his house for good luck when they passed, and asked him to be godfather to their children. Everyone believed he had a connection to the divine.
"You must have thought so yourself as a child," Madame Morgenstern said.
"I did! I thought he was invincible--even more so than most children think of their parents," Andras said. "Sometimes I wish I'd never lost the illusion."
"Ah, yes," she said. "I understand."
"My parents are getting older," Andras said. "I hate to think of them alone in Konyar. My father had pneumonia last year, and couldn't work for a month afterward."
He hadn't spoken about this to anyone in Paris. "My younger brother's at school a few hours away, but he's caught up in his own life. And now my older brother's leaving, going off to medical school in Italy."
A shadow came to Madame Morgenstern's features again, as if she'd experienced an inward twist of pain. "My mother's getting older, too," she said. "It's been a long time since I've seen her, a very long time." She fell silent and glanced away from the table at the tall west-facing windows. The late autumn light fell in a diagonal plane across her face, illuminating the tapered curve of her mouth. "Forgive me," she said, trying to smile; he offered his handkerchief, and she pressed it to her eyes.
He found himself fighting the impulse to touch her, to trace a line from her nape down the curve of her back. "Perhaps I've stayed too long," he said.
"No, please," she said. "You haven't even had dessert."
As if she'd been listening just beyond the dining-room door, Mrs. Apfel came in at that moment to serve the walnut strudel. Andras found that he had an appetite again.
He was ravenous, in fact. He ate three slices of strudel and drank coffee with cream. As he did, he told Madame Morgenstern about his studies, about Professor Vago, about the trip to Boulogne-Billancourt. He found her easier to talk to than Madame Gerard. She had a way of pausing in quiet thought before she responded; she would pull her lips in pensively, and when she spoke, her voice was low and encouraging. After lunch they went back to the parlor and looked through her album of picture postcards. Her dancer friends had traveled as far as Chicago and Cairo. There was even a hand-colored postcard from Africa: three animals that looked like deer, but were slighter and more graceful, with straight upcurved horns and almond-shaped eyes. The French word for them was gazelle.
"Gazelle," Andras said. "I'll try to remember."
"Yes, try," she said, and smiled. "Next time I'll test you."
When the afternoon light had begun to wane, she rose and led Andras to the hallway, where his coat and hat hung on a polished stand. She gave him his things and returned his handkerchief. As she led him down the stairs she pointed out the photographs on the wall, images of students from years past: girls in ethereal clouds of tulle or sylphlike draperies of silk, young dancers under the transient spell of costumes and makeup and stage lights. Their expressions were serious, their arms as pale and nude as the branches of winter trees. He wanted to stay and look. He wondered if any of the photographs were of Madame Morgenstern herself when she was a child.
"Thank you for everything," he said when they'd reached the bottom of the stairs.
"Please." She put a slim hand on his arm. "I should thank you. You were very kind to stay."
Andras flushed so deeply at the pressure of her hand that he could feel the blood beating in his temples. She opened the door and he stepped out into the chill of the afternoon. He found he couldn't look at her to say goodbye. Next time I'll test you. But she'd returned his handkerchief as though their paths were unlikely to cross again. He spoke his goodbye to the doorstep, to her feet in their fawn-colored shoes. Then he turned away and she closed the door behind him. Without thinking, he retraced his steps toward the river until he had reached the Pont Marie. There he paused at the edge of the bridge and brought out the handkerchief. It was still damp where she'd used it to dry her eyes.
As if in a dream, he put a corner of it into his mouth and tasted the salt she'd left there.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gare d'Orsay
THAT NIGHT HE found it impossible to sleep. He couldn't stop reviewing every detail of his afternoon at the Morgensterns'. The shameful bouquet, and how doubly shameful it had looked when she'd carried it into the parlor in the blue glass vase. The moment when he'd realized that she must be the elder Mrs. Hasz's daughter, and how it had flustered him to discover it--how he'd said The pleasure to make your acquaintance and Thank you for the invitation of me. How she'd held her back straight as though she were always dancing, until the moment at the table after Elisabet had gone--the way her back had curved then, showing the linked pearls of her spine, and how he'd wanted to touch her. The way she'd listened as he'd told his father's story. The close heat of her shoulder as she sat beside him on the sofa in the parlor, paging through the album of picture postcards. The moment at the door when she'd rested her hand on his arm. He tried to re-create an image of her in his mind--the dark sweep of hair across her brow, the gray eyes that seemed too large for her face, the clean line of her jaw, the mouth that drew in upon itself as she considered what he'd said--but he couldn't make the disparate elements add up to an image of her. He saw her again as she turned to smile at him over her shoulder, girlish and wise at the same time. But what was he thinking, what could he be thinking? What an absurdity for him to think this way about a woman like Claire Morgenstern--he, Andras, a twenty-two-year-old student who lived in an unheated room and drank tea from a jam jar because he couldn't afford coffee or a coffee cup. And yet she hadn't sent him away, she'd kept talking to him, he'd made her laugh, she'd accepted his handkerchief, she'd touched his arm in a confiding and intimate manner.
For hours he rolled over and over in bed, trying to put her out of his mind. When the sky outside his window filled with a deep gray-blue light, he wanted to cry. All night he'd lain awake, and soon he would have to get up and go to class and then to work, where Madame Gerard would want to hear about the visit. It was Monday morning, the beginning of a new week. The night
Thank you for the
For the what? For the very pleasant afternoon? How flat it would sound. How much that would make it seem like any ordinary afternoon. Whatever else it had been, it hadn't been that. What was he supposed to write? He wanted to express his gratitude for Madame Morgenstern's hospitality; that was certain. But underneath he wanted to send a coded message, to convey what he had felt and what he felt now--that a kind of electrical conduit had opened between them and ran between them still; that he'd taken her at her word when she'd suggested they might see each other again. He scratched out the lines he'd written and started again. Dear Madame Morgenstern, As absurd as it sounds, I've been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck.