The Invisible Bridge (11 page)

"And does Tibor speak Italian?" she asked as she rubbed cold cream into her forehead. "Has he studied the language?"

"He'll learn it faster than I learned French. In school he won the Latin prize three years running."

"And is he eager to leave?"

"Quite eager," Andras said. "But he can't go until January."

"And what else interests him besides medicine?"

"Politics. The state of the world."

"Well, that's excusable in a young man. And beyond that? What does he do in his spare time? Does he have a lady friend? Will he have to leave someone behind in Budapest?"

Andras shook his head. "He works night and day. There's no spare time."

"Indeed," said Madame Gerard, swiping at her cheeks with a pink velvet sponge.

She turned a look of bemused inquiry upon Andras, her eyebrows raised in their narrow twin arcs. "And what about you?" she said. "You must have a little friend."

Andras blushed profoundly. He had never discussed the subject with any adult woman, not even his mother. "Not a trace of one," he said.

"I see," said Madame Gerard. "Then perhaps you won't object to a lunch invitation from a friend of mine. A Hungarian woman I know, a talented instructress of ballet, has a daughter a few years younger than you. A very handsome girl by the name of Elisabet. She's tall, blond, brilliant in school--gets high marks in mathematics. Won some sort of city-wide math competition, poor girl. I'm certain she must speak some Hungarian, though she's emphatically French. She might introduce you to some of her friends."

A tall blond girl, emphatically French, who spoke Hungarian and might show him another side of Paris: He could hardly say no to that. In the back of his mind he could hear Rosen telling him he couldn't stay a virgin forever. He found himself saying he'd be delighted to accept the invitation to lunch at the home of Marcelle Gerard's friend.

Madame Gerard wrote the name and address on the back of her own calling card.

"Sunday at noon," she said. "I can't be there myself, I'm afraid. I've already accepted another invitation. But I assure you you've got nothing to fear from Elisabet or her mother." She handed him the card. "They live not far from here, in the Marais."

He glanced at the address, wondering if the house were in the part of the Marais he had visited with his history class; then he experienced a sharp mnemonic tug and had to look again.
Morgenstern
, Madame Gerard had written.
39 rue de Sevigne
.

"Morgenstern," he said aloud.

"Yes. The house is at the corner of the rue d'Ormesson." And then she seemed to notice something strange about Andras's expression. "Is there a problem, my dear?"

He had a momentary urge to tell her about his visit to the house on Benczur utca, about the letter he'd carried to Paris, but he remembered Mrs. Hasz's plea for discretion and recovered quickly. "It's nothing," he said. "It's been a while since I've had to appear in polite company, that's all."

"You'll do splendidly," said Madame Gerard. "You're more of a gentleman than most gentlemen I know." She stood and gave him her queenly smile, a kind of private performance of her own authority and elegance; then she drew her Chinese robe around her and retreated behind the gold-painted lindens of her dressing screen.

...

That night he sat on his bed and looked at the card, the address. He knew that the world of Hungarian expatriates in Paris was a finite one, and that Madame Gerard was well connected within it, but he felt nonetheless that this convergence must have some deeper meaning. He was certain his memory was correct; he hadn't forgotten the name Morgenstern, nor the street name rue de Sevigne. It thrilled him to think he would find out if Tibor had been right when he'd guessed that the letter had been addressed to the elder Mrs. Hasz's former lover. When he arrived at the Morgensterns', would he encounter a silver-haired gentleman--the father-in-law, perhaps, of Madame Morgenstern--who might be the mysterious
C
? How were the Haszes of Budapest connected with a ballet teacher in the Marais? And how would he refrain from mentioning any of this to Jozsef Hasz the next time they met?

But in the days that followed, he found he had little time to think about the approaching visit to the Morgensterns'. Only a month remained before the end of the term, and in three weeks' time there would be a critique of the students' fall projects. His project was a model of the Gare d'Orsay, built from his measured drawing; he'd finished the plans but had yet to begin the model itself. He would have to buy materials, study topographical maps so he could build the base, make templates for the forms of the model, cut out the forms, draw the arched windows and clock faces and all the stone detailing, and assemble them into the finished piece. He spent the week in studio surrounded by his plans. At night, after work, he was consumed with preparations for a statics exam, and in the afternoons he attended a series of lectures by Perret on the illfated Fonthill Abbey, a nineteenth-century faux cathedral whose tower had collapsed three times due to poor design, hasty construction, and the use of shoddy materials.

By Saturday afternoon when he arrived at work, the only mystery in his mind was how he had managed to reach the day before the luncheon without having had his only white shirt laundered, and without having set aside a few francs for a gift for his hostess.

After confessing the problem of his attire to Madame Gerard, he found himself in the workshop of the wardrobe mistress, Madame Courbet, who had constructed all the workers' clothes and military uniforms required for
The Mother
. While the revolution unfolded onstage, Madame Courbet had turned her attention to a different struggle: She was sewing fifty tutus for a children's dance recital that was take place at the Bernhardt that winter. Andras found her sitting amid a storm of white tulle and tiny silk flowers, her sewing machine beating its mechanical thunder at the center of that snowy cumulus. She was a sparrowlike woman past fifty, always dressed in impeccably tailored clothes; today her green wool dress was frosted with icy-looking fibers, and she held a spool of silver-white thread between her fingers. She removed her rimless spectacles to look at Andras.

"Ah, young Mr. Levi," she said. "And is it another complaint from Monsieur Claudel, or has someone else split a seam?" She twisted her mouth into a wry moue.

"It's something for me, actually," he said. "I'm afraid I need a shirt."

"A shirt? Are you to have a walk-on in the play?"

"No," he said, and blushed. "I need a shirt for a luncheon tomorrow."

"I see." She lay down the thread and crossed her arms. "That's not my usual line."

"I hate to disturb you when you're already so busy."

"Madame Gerard sent you, didn't she."

Andras confessed that she had.

"That woman," said Madame Courbet. But she got up from her little chair and stood in front of Andras, looking him up and down. "I wouldn't do this for just anyone,"

she said. "You're a good young man. They hound you to death here and pay you almost nothing, but you've never been short with me. Which is more than I can say for certain people." She took a tape measure from a table and strapped a pincushion to her wrist.

"Now, a gentleman's shirt, is it? You'll want a plain white oxford, of course. Nothing fancy." With a few deft movements she measured Andras's neck and shoulders and the length of his arm, then went to a wardrobe cabinet marked
CHEMISES
. From it she extracted a fine white shirt with a crisp collar. She showed Andras how the shirt contained a special pocket inside for a tube of fake blood; in one play, a man had to be stabbed night after night by his wife's jealous lover, and Madame Courbet had had to make an endless supply of shirts. From a drawer marked
CRVT
she selected a blue silk tie decorated with partridges. "It's an aristocrat's tie," she said, "a rich man's tie done up from a scrap. Look." She turned the tie over to show him how she'd sewn the silk remnant onto a plain cotton backing. Andras put it on along with the shirt, and she pinned the shirt for a swift alteration. At the end of the evening she gave him the finished shirt, wrapped in brown paper. "Don't let anyone else know where you got this," she said. "I wouldn't want the word to get out." But she pinched his ear affectionately as she sent him on his way.

As he was leaving, he had a sudden inspiration. He went to the grand front entrance of the theater, where Pely, the custodian, was sweeping the marble floor with his push broom. As usual, Pely had set the previous week's flower arrangements in a row inside the front doors; in the morning they would be picked up by the florist, vases and all, and replaced with new ones. Andras tipped his cap at Pely.

"If no one's using these flowers," he said, "may I?"

"Of course! Take them all. Take as many as you like."

Andras gathered a staggering armload of roses and lilies and chrysanthemums, branches with red berries, faux bluebirds on green twigs, feathery bunches of fern. He would not arrive empty-handed at the Morgensterns' on the rue de Sevigne; no, not he.

IT HAD BEEN only a few weeks since Andras had studied the architecture of the Marais with Perret's class. They had taken a special trip to see the Hotel de Sens, the fifteenth-century city palace with its turrets and leonine gargoyles, its confusion of rooflines, its cramped and cluttered facade. Andras had expected Perret's lecture to be a stern critique, a disquisition on the virtues of simplicity. But the lesson had been about the strength of the building, the fine craftsmanship that had allowed it to endure. Perret moved his hand along the stonework of the front entrance, showing the students what care the masons had taken in cutting the voussoirs of the Gothic arches. As he spoke, a pair of Orthodox men had appeared on the street, leading a group of schoolboys in yarmulkes. The two groups of students had stared at each other as they passed. The boys whispered to each other, looking at Perret in his military cloak; a few lagged behind as if to hear what Perret might say next. One boy snapped a salute, and his teacher delivered a reprimand in Yiddish.

Now Andras passed behind the Hotel de Sens, past the manicured topiary gardens and the raised beds planted with purple kale for winter. Hefting his load of flowers, he sidestepped through the traffic on the rue de Rivoli. In the Marais the streets had an inside feel, almost as if they were part of a movie set. In
Cinescope
and
Le Film Complet
, Andras had seen the miniature cities built inside cavernous sound-stages in Los Angeles; here, the pale blue winter sky seemed like the arching roof of a studio, and Andras half expected to see men and women in medieval costume moving between the buildings, trailed by megaphone-wielding directors, by cameramen with their rafts of complicated equipment. There were kosher butchers and Hebrew bookshops and synagogues, all of them with signs written in Yiddish, as though this were a different country within the city. But there was no anti-Semitic graffiti of the kind that regularly appeared in the Jewish Quarter in Budapest. Instead the walls were bare, or plastered with advertisements for soap or chocolate or cigarettes. As Andras entered the tall corridor of the rue de Sevigne, a black taxi roared past, nearly knocking him off his feet. He steadied himself, shifted his vast bouquet from one arm to the other, and checked the address on the card Madame Gerard had given him.

Across the street he could see a windowed shop front with a wooden sign cut into the form of a child ballerina, and beneath it the legend
ECOLE DEBALLET--MMEMORGENSTERN, MAITRESSE
. He crossed the street. A set of demi-curtained windows ran along both sides of the corner building, and when he stood on his toes he could see an empty room with a floor of yellow wood. One wall was lined from end to end with mirrors; polished wooden practice barres ran along the others. A squat upright piano crouched in one corner, and beside it stood a table with an old-fashioned gramophone, its glossy black morning-glory horn catching the light. A diffuse haze of dust motes hovered in the midday silence. Some remnant of movement, of music, seemed revealed in that tourbillon of dust, as if ballet continued to exist in that room whether a class was being conducted there or not.

The building entrance was a green door set with a leaded glass window. Andras rang the bell and waited. Through the sheer panel that covered the window, he could see a stout woman descending a flight of stairs. She opened the door and put a hand on her hip, giving him an appraising look. She was red-faced, kerchiefed, with a deep smell of paprika about her, like the women who brought vegetables and goat's milk to sell at the market in Debrecen.

"Madame Morgenstern?" he said, with hesitation; she didn't look much like a ballet mistress.

"Hah! No," she said in Hungarian. "Come in and close the door behind you.

You'll let in the cold."

So he must have passed her inspection; he was glad, because the smells coming from inside were making him dizzy with hunger. He stepped into the entry, and the woman continued in a rapid stream of Hungarian as she took his coat and hat. What an enormous lot of flowers. She would see if there was a vase upstairs large enough to hold them. Lunch was nearly ready. She had prepared stuffed cabbage, and she hoped he liked it, because there was nothing else, except for spaetzle and a fruit compote and some sliced cold chicken and a walnut strudel. He should follow her upstairs. Her name was Mrs. Apfel. They climbed to the second floor, where she directed him to a front parlor decorated with worn Turkish rugs and dark furniture; she told him to wait there for Madame Morgenstern.

He sat on a gray velvet settee and took a long breath. Beneath the heady smell of stuffed cabbage there was the dry lemony tang of furniture polish and a faint scent of licorice. On a small carved table before him was a candy dish, a cut-glass nest filled with pink and lilac sugar eggs. He took an egg and ate it: anise. He straightened his tie and made sure the cotton backing wasn't showing. After a moment he heard the click of heels in the hallway. A slim shadow moved across the wall, and a girl entered with a blue glass vase in her hands. The vase bristled with a wild profusion of flowers and branches and fake bluebirds, the daylilies beginning to darken at their edges, the roses hanging heavy on their stems. From behind this mass of fading blooms the girl looked at Andras, her dark hair brushed like a wing across her forehead.