The Invisible Bridge (12 page)

"Thank you for the flowers," she said in French.

As she set the vase on the sideboard, he saw she wasn't a girl at all; her features had the sharper angles of an adult woman's, and she held her back straight as if from decades of ballet training. But she was lithe and small, her hands like a child's on the blue glass vase. Andras drank in a flood of embarrassment as he watched her arrange the bouquet. Why had he brought so many half-dead flowers? Why the bluebirds? Why all those branches? Why hadn't he just bought something simple at the corner market? A dozen daisies? A sheaf of lupines? How much could it have cost? A couple of francs?

The wood nymph smiled back at him over her shoulder, then came to shake his hand.

"Claire Morgenstern," she said. "It's a pleasure to meet you at last, Mr. Levi.

Madame Gerard has had many kind things to say about you."

He took her hand, trying not to stare; she looked decades younger than he'd imagined. He'd envisioned her as a woman of Madame Gerard's age, but this woman couldn't have been more than thirty. She had a quiet, astonishing beauty--fine bones, a mouth like a smooth pink-skinned fruit, large intelligent gray eyes. Claire Morgenstern: So this was the
C
. of the letter, not some elderly gentleman who had once been Mrs.

Hasz's lover. Her large gray eyes were Mrs. Hasz's eyes, the quiet grief he saw there a mirror of the expression he'd seen in the older woman's eyes. This Claire Morgenstern had to be Mrs. Hasz's daughter. A long moment passed before Andras could speak.

"The pleasure to make your acquaintance," he said in rushed and stilted French, knowing he'd gotten it wrong as soon as he said it. Belatedly he remembered to rise, and though he struggled for the right words, found himself continuing in the same vein.

"Thank you for the invitation of me," he stammered, and sat down again.

Madame Morgenstern took a seat beside him on a low chair. "Would you rather speak Hungarian?" she asked in Hungarian. "We can, if you like."

He looked up at her as if from the bottom of a well. "French is fine," he said, in Hungarian. And then in French, again, "French is fine."

"All right, then," she said. "You'll have to tell me what Hungary is like these days.

It's been years since I was there, and Elisabet has never been."

As if she'd been conjured by the mention of her name, a tall stern-looking girl entered the room, carrying a pitcher of iced tea. She was broad-shouldered like the swimmers Andras had admired at Palatinus Strand in Budapest; she gave him a look of impatient disdain as she filled his glass.

"This is my Elisabet," said Madame Morgenstern. "Elisabet, this is Andras."

Andras couldn't make himself believe that this girl was Madame Morgenstern's daughter. In Elisabet's hands, the tea pitcher looked like a child's toy. He drank his tea and looked from mother to daughter. Madame Morgenstern stirred her tea with a long spoon, while Elisabet, having set the pitcher on a table, threw herself into a wing chair and checked her wristwatch.

"If we don't eat now I'll be late for the movie," she said. "I'm supposed to meet Marthe in an hour."

"What movie?" Andras said, searching for a thread of conversation.

"You wouldn't be interested," Elisabet said. "It's in French."

"But I speak French," Andras said.

Elisabet gave him a dry smile. "May-juh-pargl-Fronsay," she said.

Madame Morgenstern closed her eyes. "Elisabet," she said.

"What?"

"You know what."

"I just want to go to the movies," Elisabet said, and knocked her heels dully against the rug. Then she tilted her chin toward Andras and said, "Lovely tie."

Andras looked down. His tie had flipped over as he'd leaned forward to take his glass of tea, and now the cotton backing faced the world, while the gold partridges flew unseen against his shirtfront. Hot with shame, he turned it around and stared into his tea.

"Lunch is served!" said the red-faced Mrs. Apfel from the doorway, pushing back her kerchief. "Come now, before the cabbage gets cold."

...

There was a proper dining room, with polished wooden china cabinets and a white cloth on the table: echoes of the house on Benczur utca, Andras thought. But there were no exsanguinated sandwiches here; the table was heavy with platters of stuffed cabbage and chicken and bowls of spaetzle, as though there were eight of them eating instead of three. Madame Morgenstern sat at the head of the table, Andras and Elisabet across from each other. Mrs. Apfel served the stuffed cabbage and spaetzle; Andras, grateful for the distraction, tucked his napkin into his collar and began to eat. Elisabet frowned at her plate. She pushed the cabbage aside and began eating the spaetzle, one tiny dumpling at a time.

"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.

"I used to have a vineyard," Bela said. "When I had a vineyard, I would have let you pick my grapes. When I had a house I would have welcomed you to my house. My wife would have given you something to eat. Now I have neither grapes nor house. I have no wife. I have no food. But I can work."

"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.