The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
Andras rubbed his palms against his thighs. "I shouldn't have," he said.
"It's well she ended it," Madame Gerard said. "She knew it wasn't right. She invited you into her house thinking you might be a friend to her daughter. You should have stopped going once you knew you didn't care for Elisabet."
"It was too late by then," he said. "I couldn't stop."
"You don't know Klara," Madame Gerard said. "You can't, not after a few Sunday lunches and a week-long affair. She's never made any man happy. She's had ample chance to fall in love--and, if you'll pardon me, with grown men, not first-year architecture students. Don't imagine she hasn't had plenty of suitors. If she ever does take a man seriously, it'll be because she wants to get married--that is to say, because she wants someone to ease her life, to take care of her. Which you, my dear, are in no position to do."
"You don't have to remind me of that."
"Well, someone must, apparently!"
"But what now?" he demanded. "I can't pretend it didn't happen."
"Why not? It's over between the two of you. You said as much yourself."
"It's not over for me. I can't put her out of my mind."
"I'd advise you to try," Madame Gerard said. "She can't be any good to you."
"That's all, then? I'm supposed to forget her?"
"That would be best."
"Impossible," he said.
"Poor darling," Madame Gerard said. "I'm sorry. But you'll get over it. Young men do." She turned again to her packing, loading her gold and silver makeup sticks into a box with dozens of little drawers. A private smile came to her mouth; she rolled a tube of rouge between her fingers and turned to him. "You've joined an illustrious club, you know, now that Klara's thrown you over. Most men never make it that far."
"Please," he said. "I can't bear to hear you speak of her that way."
"It's the girl's father, you know. I think she must still be in love with him."
"Elisabet's father," he said. "Is he here in Paris? Does she still see him?"
"Oh, no. He died many years ago, as I understand it. But death isn't a bar to love, as you may learn someday."
"Who
was
he?"
"I'm afraid I don't know. Klara keeps her history close."
"So it's hopeless, then. I'm supposed to let it go because she's in love with a dead man."
"Allow it to be what it was: a pretty episode. The satisfaction of a mutual curiosity."
"That wasn't what it was to me."
She tilted her head at him and smiled again, that terrible all-knowing smile. "I'm afraid I'm the wrong person to dispense advice about love. Unless you'd like to be disabused of your romantic notions."
"You'll excuse me, then, if I leave you to your packing."
"My dear boy, no excuse needed." She rose, kissed him on both cheeks, and turned him out into the hall. There was no choice for him but to go back to his work; he did it in mute consternation, wishing he had never confided in her.
There was one great source of relief, one astonishing piece of news that had arrived in a telegram from Budapest: Tibor was coming to visit. His classes in Modena would start at the end of January, but before he went to Italy he would come to Paris for a week. When the telegram arrived, Andras had shouted the news aloud into the stairwell of the building, at a volume that had brought the concierge out into the hall to reprimand him for disturbing the other tenants. He silenced her by kissing her on the brow and showing her the telegram: Tibor was coming! Tibor, his older brother. The concierge voiced the hope that this older brother would beat some manners into Andras, and left him in the hall to experience his delight alone. Andras hadn't mentioned Klara in his letters to Tibor, but he felt as if Tibor knew--as if Tibor had sensed that Andras was in distress and had decided to come for that reason.
The anticipation of the visit--three weeks away, then two, then one--got him from home to school, and from school to work. Now that The Mother was finished and Madame Gerard gone, afternoons at the Sarah-Bernhardt passed at a maddening crawl.
He had arranged everything so well backstage that there was little to do while the actors rehearsed; he paced behind the curtain, subject to an increasing fear that Monsieur Novak would discover his superfluity. One afternoon, after he'd overseen the delivery of a load of lumber for the set of Fuente Ovejuna, he approached the head carpenter and offered his services as a set builder. The head carpenter put him to work. During the afternoon hours Andras banged flats together; after hours he studied the design of the new sets. This was a different kind of architecture, all about illusion and impression: perspective flattened to make spaces look deeper, hidden doors through which actors might materialize or disappear, pieces that could be turned backward or inside out to create new tableaux. He began to mull over the design in bed at night, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Klara. The false fronts that represented the Spanish town might be put on wheels and rotated, he thought; their opposite sides could be painted to represent the building interiors. He made a set of sketches showing how it might be done, and later he redrew the sketches as plans. His second week as assistant set builder he went to the head carpenter and showed him the work. The carpenter asked him if he thought he had a budget of a million francs. Andras told him it would cost less than building the two sets of flats that would be required to make separate exteriors and interiors. The head carpenter scratched his head and said he'd consult the set designer. The set designer, a tall round-shouldered man with an ill-trimmed moustache and a monocle, scrutinized the plans and asked Andras why he was still working as a gofer. Did he want a job that would pay three times what he was making now? The set designer had an independent shop on the rue des Lombards and generally employed an assistant, but his most recent one had just finished his coursework at the Beaux-Arts and had taken a position outside the capital.
Andras did want the job. But Zoltan Novak had saved his life; he couldn't very well walk out on the Sarah-Bernhardt. He accepted the man's business card and stared at it all that night, wondering what to do.
The next afternoon he went to Novak's office to lay the situation before him.
There was a long silence after he knocked, then the sound of male voices in argument; the door flew open to reveal a pair of men in pinstriped suits, briefcases in hand, their faces flushed as though Novak had been insulting them in the vilest terms. The men clapped hats onto their heads and walked out past Andras without a nod or glance. Inside the office Novak stood at his desk with his hands on the blotter, watching the men recede down the hallway. When they'd disappeared, he came out from behind the desk and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey from the decanter on the sideboard. He looked over his shoulder at Andras and pointed to a glass. Andras raised a hand and shook his head.
"Please," Novak said. "I insist." He poured whiskey and added water.
Andras had never seen Novak drinking before dusk. He accepted the tumbler and sat down in one of the ancient leather chairs.
"Egeszsegedre," Novak said. He lifted his glass, drained it, set it down on the blotter. "Can you guess who that was, leaving?"
"No," Andras said. "But they looked rather grim."
"They're our money men. The people who've always managed to persuade the city to let us keep our doors open."
"And?"
Novak sat back in his chair and laced his hands into a mountain. "Fifty-seven people," he said. "That's how many I have to fire today, according to those men.
Including myself, and you."
"But that's everyone," Andras said.
"Precisely," he said. "They're closing us down. We're finished until next season, at least. They can't support us any longer, even though we've posted profits all fall. The Mother did better than any other show in Paris, you know. But it wasn't enough. This place is a money-sink. Do you know what it costs to heat five stories of open space?"
Andras took a swallow of whiskey and felt the false warmth of it move through his chest. "W
"What
will
you do?" Novak said. "And what will the actors do? And Madame Courbet? And Claudel, and Pely, and all the others? It's a disaster. We're not the only ones, either. They're closing four theaters." He sat back in his chair and stroked his moustache with one finger, his eyes moving over the bookshelves. "The fact is, I'm not sure what I'll do. Madame Novak is in a delicate condition, as they say. She's been pining for her parents in Budapest. I'm sure she'll take this as a sign that we should return home."
"But you'd rather stay," Andras said.
Novak released a sigh from the broad bellows of his chest. "I understand how Edith feels. This isn't our home. We've scratched out our little corner here, but none of it belongs to us. We're Hungarians, in the end, not French."
"When I met you in Vienna, I thought no man could look more Parisian."
"Now you see how green you were," Novak said, and smiled sadly. "But what about you? I know you've got your school fees to pay."
Andras told him about the offer of an assistantship with the set designer, Monsieur Forestier, and how he'd just been coming to ask Novak's advice on the matter.
Novak brought his hands together, a single beat of applause. "It would have been a terrible shame to lose you," he said. "But it's an excellent chance, and well timed.
You've got to do it, of course."
"I can't thank you enough for what you've done," Andras said.
"You're a good young man. You've worked hard here. I've never regretted taking you on." He drained the rest of his drink and pushed the empty glass across the desk.
"Now, would you fill that again for me? I've got to go break the news to the others. You'll come to work tomorrow, I hope. There'll be a great deal to do, getting this place closed down. You'll have to tell Forestier I can't release you until the end of the month."
"Tomorrow, as usual," Andras said.
He went home that evening with a frightening sense of vacancy in his chest. No more Sarah-Bernhardt. No more Monsieur Novak. No more Claudel, or Pely; no more Marcelle Gerard. And no more Klara, no more Klara. The hard white shell of his life punctured and blown clean. He was light now, hollow, an empty egg. Hollow and light, he drifted home through the January wind. At 34 rue des Ecoles he climbed the flights and flights of stairs--how many hundreds of them were there?--feeling he didn't have the energy to look at his books that night, nor even to wash his face or change for bed. He wanted only to lie down in his trousers and shoes and overcoat, pull the eiderdown over his head, ride out the hours before dawn. But at the top of the stairs he saw a line of light coming from beneath his own door, and when he put a hand on the doorknob he found it unlocked. He pushed the door open and let it swing. A fire in the grate; bread and wine on the table; in the single chair with a book in her hands, Klara.
"Te," he said. You.
"And you," she said.
"How did you get in?"
"I told the concierge it was your birthday. I said I was planning a surprise."
"And what did you tell your daughter?"
She looked down at the cover of her book. "I told her I was going to see a friend."
"What a shame that wasn't true."
She got to her feet, crossed the room to him, put her hands on his arms. "Please, Andras," she said. "Don't speak to me that way."
He moved away from her and took off his coat, his scarf. For what felt like a long time he couldn't say anything more; he went to the fireplace and crossed his arms, looking down into a faltering pyramid of bright coals. "It was bad enough, not knowing whether or not I'd see you again," he said. "I told myself we were finished, but I couldn't convince myself it was true. Finally I confided in Marcelle. She was kind enough to tell me I wasn't alone in my misery. She said I belonged to an illustrious club of men you'd thrown over."
Her gray eyes darkened. "Thrown over? Is that what you feel I've done to you?"
"Thrown over, jettisoned, sent packing. I don't suppose it matters what you call it."
"We decided it was impossible."
"You
decided."
She went to him and moved her hands over his arms, and when she looked up into his face he saw there were tears in her eyes. To his horror his own eyes began to burn.
This was Klara, whose name he'd carried with him from Budapest; Klara, whose voice came to him in his sleep.
"What do you want?" he said into her hair. "What am I supposed to do?"
"I've been miserable," she said. "I can't let it go. I want to know you, Andras."
"And I want to know you," he said. "I don't like secrecy." But he knew as he said it that what was hidden made her all the more attractive; there was a kind of torment in her unknowability, in the rooms that lay beyond the ones in which she entertained him.
"You'll have to be patient with me," she said. "You'll have to let me trust you."
"I can be patient," he said. He had drawn her so close that the sharp crests of her pelvis pressed against him; he wanted to reach into her body and grab her by the bones.
"Claire Morgenstern," he said. "Klarika." She would ruin him, he thought. But he could no sooner have sent her away than he could have dismissed geometry from architecture, or the cold from January, or the winter sky from outside his window. He bent to her and kissed her. Then, for the first time, he took her into his own bed.
When he stepped into the world the next morning it was a transformed place. The dullness of the weeks without her had fallen away. He had become human again, had reclaimed his own flesh and blood, and hers. Everything glittered too brilliantly in the winter sun; every detail of the street rushed at him as if he were seeing it for the first time. How had he never noticed the way light fell from the sky onto the bare limbs of the lindens outside his building, the way it broke and diffused on the wet paving stones and needled whitely from the polished brass handles of the doors along the street? He savored the bracing slap of his soles against the sidewalk, fell in love with the cascade of ice in the frozen fountain of the Luxembourg. He wanted to thank someone aloud for the fine long corridor of the boulevard Raspail, which conducted him every day along its row of Haussmann-era buildings to the blue doors of the Ecole Speciale. He adored the empty courtyard awash with winter sunlight, its green benches empty, its grass frozen, its paths wet with melted snow. A speckle-breasted bird on a branch pronounced her name exactly: Klara, Klara.
He ran upstairs to the studio and looked among the drawings for the new set of plans he'd been working on with Polaner. He thought he might spend a few minutes on them before he had to report to Vago for his morning French. But the plans weren't there; Polaner must have taken them home with him. Instead he picked up the textbook of architectural vocabulary he would study that morning with Vago, and ran downstairs again for a stop at the men's room. He pushed open the door into echoing dark and fumbled for the light switch. From the far corner of the room came a low wheezing groan.
Andras turned on the light. On the concrete floor, against the wall beyond the urinals and the sinks, someone was curled into a tight G. A small form, a man's, in a velvet jacket. Beside him a set of plans, crumpled and boot-stomped.
"Polaner?"
That sound again. A wheeze sliding into a groan. And then his own name.
Andras went to him and knelt beside him on the concrete. Polaner wouldn't look at Andras, or couldn't. His face was dark with bruises, his nose broken, his eyes hidden in purple folds. He kept his knees tight against his chest.
"My God," Andras said. "What happened? Who did this?"
No
response.
"Don't move," Andras said, and staggered to his feet. He turned and ran out of the room, across the courtyard, and up the stairs to Vago's office, and opened the door without knocking.
"Levi, what on earth?"
"Eli Polaner's been beaten half to death. He's in the men's room, ground floor."
They ran downstairs. Vago tried to get Polane
"Stay here, both of you," Vago said. "I'm going to call an ambulance."
"No," Polaner said. "No ambulance." But Vago had already gone, the door slamming behind him as he ran into the courtyard.
Polaner rolled onto his back, letting his arms go limp. Beneath the velvet jacket his shirt had been torn open, and something had been written on his chest in black ink.
Feygele. A Jewish fag.
Andras touched the torn shirt, the word. Polaner flinched.
"Who did it?" Andras said.
"Lemarque," Polaner said. Then he mumbled something else, a phrase Andras could only hear halfway, and couldn't translate: "J'etais coin ..."