The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
"A wall like this won't last five years in Nice," he said, framing a segment of Andras's drawing with his thumbs. "Consider the salt. These crevices will give it a foothold." He laid a piece of tracing paper over Andras's drawing and sketched in a smooth wall. "But you've found a clever way to use the grade of the hill. The oblique orientation of the patio and terrace works well with the topography." He placed another sheet of tracing paper over the rear elevation and joined two levels of the terrace into a single curving slope. "Not too much terrace, though. Keep the shape of the hill intact.
You can plant rosemary to hold the soil in place."
Andras watched, making further changes in his mind. In the hard light of the office, the plans seemed less like a blueprint for a life he desired and more like the blank shape of a client's house. That room need not be called a ballet studio; it was simply a light-filled salon. And those two small bedrooms on the main level might not be children's rooms; they could be chambres 2 and 3, to be filled according to the client's whims. The kitchen did not have to contain the imagined remnants of an abandoned meal; the chambre principal didn't have to accommodate two Hungarian emigres, or anyone in particular. All afternoon he erased and redrew until he believed he had chased the ghosts from the design.
With the rolled-up plans and Lemain's sheets of tracing paper under his arm, he made his way toward the rue des Ecoles through a confetti of dry leaves. The sound of their scrape and crunch against the sidewalk made him think of a thousand autumn afternoons in Konyar and Debrecen and Budapest, the burnt smell of nuts roasting in the street vendor's cast-iron kettle, the stiff gray wool of school uniforms, the flower-sellers'
jars suddenly full of wheat sheaves and velvet-faced sunflowers. He paused at the window of a photographer's studio on the rue des Ecoles, where a new series of portraits had just been displayed: somber Parisian children in peasant clothing posed against a painted harvest backdrop. The children all wore shoes, and the shoes were brilliant with polish. He had to laugh aloud, imagining Tibor and Matyas and himself arrayed in front of a real hay wagon in the clothes they'd worn when they were children: not these impeccable smocks and trousers, but brown workshirts sewn by their mother, hand-me-down dungarees, rope belts, caps made from the cloth of their father's disintegrated overcoats. On their feet they would have worn the fine brown dust of Konyar. Their pockets would have been packed with small hard apples, their arms sore from baling hay for the neighboring farmers. From the house would come the rich red smell of chicken paprikas; their father would have sold so much wood for new hay wagons and sheds that they would eat chicken every Friday until winter. It was a good time, that stretch of warm days in October after the hay came in. The air was still soft and fragrant, the pond that would soon be frozen still a bright liquid oval reflecting mill and sky.
In the photographer's window glass, a faint shape passed across the portraits of the children: the flash of a green woolen coat, the gold sheaf of a braid. The reflection crossed the street in his direction. As it approached, its anonymous features knit themselves into a form he knew: Elisabet Morgenstern. She gave him a hard tap on the shoulder and he turned.
"Elisabet," he said. "What are you doing in the Latin Quarter on a Thursday afternoon? Going to meet Paul?"
"No," she said, and gave him her hard stare. "I came to find you." She pulled a tin of pastilles from her bag and shook one into her palm. "I'd offer you one, but I'm almost out."
"What's wrong?" he said, his insides clenching. "Has something happened to your mother?"
Elisabet rolled the pastille around in her mouth. When she spoke, Andras caught a whiff of anise. "I don't want to talk here on the sidewalk," she said. "Can't we go somewhere?"
The Blue Dove was close by, but Andras didn't want to meet his friends. Instead he led her around the corner and up the hill to the Cafe Bedouin, where he and Klara had met for a drink what seemed a lifetime ago. He hadn't been back since that night. The same toothy row of liquor bottles stood behind the bar, and the same faded lilac curtains hung at the windows. They sat down at a table along the banquette and ordered tea.
"What's this about?" he said, once the waiter had left them.
"Whatever you're doing to my mother, you'd better stop," Elisabet said.
"I don't know what you mean. I haven't seen her in weeks."
"That's exactly my point! To put it bluntly, Andras, you're acting like a cad. My mother's been miserable. She hardly eats. She won't listen to music. She sleeps all the time. And she's at me for every little thing. My marks in school aren't high enough, or I'm not doing my chores properly, or I've taken the wrong tone with her."
"And this is somehow my doing?"
"Who else's? You've dropped her entirely. You don't come to the house anymore.
You sent back all her things."
In an instant his grief rushed back as if it had never left him. "What was I supposed to do?" he said. "I stood it as long as I could. She wouldn't write to me or see me. And I did go to her. I went after Rosh Hashanah, when everyone was talking about an evacuation. Mrs. Apfel said your mother wasn't receiving anyone, least of all me.
Even after that, she didn't send word. I had to give it up. I had to respect her wishes. And I had to keep myself from losing my mind, too."
"So you walked away because it was easier for you."
"I didn't walk away, Elisabet. I wrote to her when I sent her things. I told her my feelings were unchanged. She didn't write back. It's clear she doesn't want to see me."
"If that's true, then why is she so unhappy? It's not as though she's seeing someone else. She never goes out. At night she's always home. On Sunday afternoons she lies in bed." The waiter delivered their tea, and Elisabet stirred milk into her cup. "She never gives me a moment alone with Paul. I have to sneak out in the middle of the night to see him."
"Is that what this is about? You can't get a moment alone with Paul?"
She glared at him, her mouth tight with disgust. "You're an ass, do you know that?
A real ass. Despite what you think, I do care how my mother feels. More than you do, apparently."
"I care!" he cried, leaning across the table. "I've been going mad over this. But I can't change her mind for her, Elisabet. I can't make her feel for me what she doesn't feel.
If we're going to speak, she'll have to be the one to contact me."
"But she won't, don't you see? She'll stay miserable. She can keep it up, you know. She's made a project of it all her life. And she'll make me miserable, too." She glanced down at her hand, where Andras noticed for the first time a ring on her fourth finger: a diamond with two leaf-shaped emeralds. As he studied it, she gave the band a contemplative twist.
"Paul and I are engaged," she said. "He wants to take me to New York when I'm finished with school next June."
He raised an eyebrow. "Does your mother know about this?"
"Of course not! You know what she'd say. She wants me to wait until I'm thirty before I look at a man. But I'd think she wouldn't want me to end up like her, alone and old."
"She
doesn't want you to end up like her. That's the point! She was too young when she had you. She doesn't want you to have to struggle like she did."
"Let me tell you something," Elisabet said, and gave him her granite-hard look. "I would never end up like her. If I got pregnant by some man who didn't love me, I know what I'd do. I know girls who've done it. I'd do what she should have done."
"How can you speak that way?" he said. "She gave up her whole life to raise you."
"That's not my fault," Elisabet said. "And it doesn't mean she can decide what I do once I turn eighteen. I'll marry whomever I want to. I'll go to New York with Paul."
"You're a selfish child, Elisabet."
"Who are you calling selfish?" She narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger at him across the cafe table. "You're the one who dropped her when she got depressed. A person in that state doesn't invite people to lunch or send love notes. But y
"Of course I did!" he said. "She was the one who pushed me away." But as he said it, he experienced a kind of pressure change, a quiet shock that thrummed in his ears. She had pushed him away, had done it more than once. But he had pushed her away too. At Nice, at the Hotel Taureau d'Or, when she'd seemed on the verge of speaking to him about her past, he'd left her alone at the table rather than hear what she might say. And later that night at the cottage, when he'd demanded she tell him everything, he had done it so roughly he'd frightened her. Then he'd packed her things and driven her back to Paris.
He had tried to see her exactly once since then. He'd written a single postcard and returned her things, then set about erasing her from his mind, his life. Their love would have a neat, sad ending: a box of things dispached, a note unanswered. He would never have to hear the revelations that might hurt him or change the way he thought of her.
Instead he'd chosen to preserve his idea of her--his memory of her small strong body, of the way she listened and spoke to him, of their nights together in his room. As much as he'd told himself he wanted to know everything about her, part of him had retreated in fear. He thought he'd loved her, but what he had loved wasn't all of her--no more than the silvery images on those long-ago cards had been, or her name on an ivory envelope.
"Do you think she'll see me?" he asked Elisabet.
She looked at him for a long moment, a faint wash of relief warming the cold blue pools of her eyes. "Ask her yourself," she said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
An Alley
IN THE NINE WEEKS since he'd seen her, time had not lain dormant. The earth had continued its transit around the sun, Germany had marched into the Sudetenland, and change had worked its way into the smaller orbit of his life. There was the raw feeling of wind at the back of his neck; he had cut the hair he'd grown long at her request. His morning tutorials with Vago had ended, and last year's graduates were gone; the new first-year students paid mute attention when he and his classmates gave their critiques in studio. He had mastered the French language, which had crossed the boundary of his unconscious mind and established itself in the territory of his dreams. He had begun his internship at the architecture firm, his first job in his chosen field. And there were new set designs at Forestier's (for Lysistrata, a foreshortened Parthenon and a forest of column-like phalluses; for The Cherry Orchard, a drawing room whose walls, made of sheer scrim fabric and lined with hidden lights, became increasingly transparent throughout the play until they disappeared to reveal the rows of trees beyond).
Then there was his room on the rue des Ecoles. He had pulled the table into the sloping cave of the eaves, where he could pin plans against the ceiling. He'd gotten a green-shaded lamp to illuminate his work, and had tacked drawings of buildings to the walls--not the ocean liners and icebergs his professors designed, nor the monumental architecture of Paris, but the neat ovoids of Ghanaian huts and the nestlike clusters of American Indian cliff-dwellings and the gold stone walls of Palestine. He'd copied the images from magazines and books, had watercolored them with paints bought cheaply at Nice. On the floor was a thick red rug that smelled of woodsmoke; on the bed, a butter-colored bedspread made from a torn theater curtain. And beside the hearth was a deep low armchair of faded vermilion plush, a reject he'd found one morning on the sidewalk in front of the building. It had been lying facedown in a posture of abject indignity, as though it had tried and failed to stagger home after a night of hard drinking. The chair had a droll companion, a fringed and tufted footstool that resembled a shaggy little dog.
It was in this armchair that Klara sat now. He had written to her, had told her he wanted to see her, had asked for nothing more than her company for an evening. Though he'd told himself not to expect an answer, he hoped Elisabet might prevail upon her to write back. Then tonight he had come home from Forestier's to find her sitting in the chair, her black shoes lined up beside it like a pair of quarter notes. He stood in the doorway and stared, afraid she might be an apparition; she got up and took the bag from his shoulder, slid her arms underneath his coat, held him against her chest. There was her smell of lavender and honey, the bready scent of her skin. The familiarity of it nearly brought him to tears. He put a thumb to the hollow of her throat, touched the amber button of her blouse.
"You've cut your hair," she said.
He nodded, unable to speak.
"And you look thin," she continued. "You look as if you haven't been eating."
"Have
you?" he said, and studied her face. The hollows beneath her eyes were shaded violet; the beach gold of her skin had faded to ivory. She looked almost transparent, as if a wind had blown her empty from the inside. She held her body as if every part of it hurt.
"I'm going to make you some tea," he said.
"Don't
trouble."
"Believe me, Klara, it's no trouble." He put water on to boil and made tea for both of them. Then he built up the fire and sat down on the fringed footstool. He pushed her skirt up above the knee, unhooked the metal loops of her garters from their rubber nubs, removed her stockings. He didn't caress her legs, though he wanted to; he didn't bury his face in her thighs. Instead he took her feet in his hands and followed their arches with his thumbs.
She let out a cry, a sigh. "Why do you persist with me?" she said. "What is it you want?"
He shook his head. "I don't know, Klara. Maybe just this."
"I've been so unhappy since we came back from Nice," she said. "I could hardly drag myself from bed. I couldn't eat. I couldn't write a letter or mend a dress. When it looked like France might go to war, I had the terrible thought that you might volunteer to fight." She paused and shook her head. "I spent two sleepless nights trying to work up the nerve to come to you, and gave myself such a terrible headache that I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't teach. I've never been too sick to teach, not in fifteen years. Mrs. Apfel had to post a note saying I was ill."
"You told her to send me away if I came to see you."
"I didn't think you'd come except to tell me you were going off to war. I didn't think I could survive that piece of news. And then you sent back my things. God, Andras!
I read your note a hundred times. I made a hundred drafts of a reply and threw them away. Everything I wrote seemed wrong or cowardly."
"And then France didn't go to war after all."
"No. And I was selfishly happy, believe me, even though I knew what it meant for Czechoslovakia."
He smiled sadly. "I didn't really send back all your things, after all. I kept the poem about Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige."
"The
Marot."
"Yes. I cut it out of your book."
"You vandalized my book!"
"I'm afraid so."
She shook her head and rested her forehead in her palm, her elbow pillowed on the arm of the chair. "When your letter came this week, my daughter told me she'd lose all respect for me if I didn't go to see you at once." She paused to give him a wry half smile. "At first I was just astonished to learn that she had any respect for me at all. Then I decided I had better come."
"Klara," he said, moving closer and taking her hands in his own. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you the difficult questions now. I have to know what you were thinking when we came back from Nice. You have to tell me about--I don't even know the man's name. Elisabet's father. You have to tell me why you came here to France."
She sighed and looked into the fire, where the heat ran like a volatile liquid through the coals. Her eyes seemed to drink the red light of it. "Elisabet's father," she said, and ran a hand along the velvet arm of the chair. "That man."
And then, though it was already past midnight, she told him her story.
In the second decade of that century, the best ballet students in Budapest had studied under Viktor Vasilievich Romankov, the willful and eccentri
Petersburg, Romankov had studied at the Imperial School of Ballet and danced in the famous ballet company at the Mariinsky Theater; at thirty-five he left to open his own school, where he taught hundreds of dancers, among them the great Olga Spessivtzeva and Alexandra Danilova. As a young man, he himself had struggled to distill the tincture of precision into his ballet technique; his efforts to demystify the physiology of dance, and the patience he had developed in his own training, had made him an unusually effective teacher. His renown spread west and crossed the Atlantic. When his family lost the last of its once-great fortune in the early rumblings of the revolution, he fled St.
Petersburg, intending to emigrate to Paris along the path traced by his hero Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes. But by the time Romankov reached Budapest he was exhausted and broke. He found himself unexpectedly in love with that city of bridges and parks, of ornately tiled buildings and tree-lined boulevards. Not more than a few days passed before he made inquiries into the Hungarian Royal Ballet; it turned out that its academy had a hopelessly antiquated system of training, and had long been in need of a change. The artistic director of the school knew of Romankov. He was precisely the sort of person the school had wanted to recruit; she was more than happy to have him join the faculty. So there in Budapest he'd stayed.