The Invisible Bridge (34 page)

By the evening service he was scraped out and numb and dizzy from fasting. He knew he was sliding toward some abyss, and that he was powerless to stop himself. At last the service concluded with the piercing spiral of the shofar blast. He and Polaner were supposed to go to dinner on the rue Saint-Jacques; Jozsef had invited them to break the fast with his friends from the Beaux-Arts. They walked across the river in silence, sunk into the last stages of their hunger. At Jozsef's there was music and a vast table of liquor and food. Jozsef wished them a happy new year and put glasses of wine into their hands. Then, with a confidential crook of his finger, he drew Andras aside and bent his head toward him.

"I heard the most remarkable thing about you," he said. "My friend Paul told me you're involved with the mother of that tall girl, his obstreperous Elisabet."

Andras shook his head. "Not anymore," he said. And he took a bottle of whiskey from the table and locked himself in Jozsef's bedroom, where he got blind drunk, shouted curses at himself in the mirror, terrified pedestrians by leaning out over the balcony edge, vomited into the fireplace, and finally passed into unconsciousness on the floor.

JUDAISM OFFERED no shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn, no injunction against shaving or listening to music or going to work. He couldn't live in his torn clothes, couldn't spend his days sitting in ashes. Nor could he turn to more secular modes of comfort; he couldn't afford to drink himself into oblivion every night or suffer a nervous collapse. After he had scraped himself off Jozsef's parquet floor and crawled back to his own apartment, he concluded that he had reached the nadir of his grief. The thought itself was medicinal. If this was the lowest point, then things would have to improve. He had made the break with Klara. Now he had to go on without her.

Classes would soon begin again at the Ecole Speciale; he couldn't fail his second year of school on her account. Nor could he justify hanging himself or leaping from a bridge or otherwise indulging in Greek tragedy. He had to go about the business of his life. He thought these things as he stood at the window of his garret, looking down into the rue des Ecoles, still nursing a wild and irrepressible hope that she'd come around the corner in her red hat, half running to see him, the skirt of her fall coat flying behind her.

But when her silence stretched into a seventh week, even his most fantastical hopes began to dull. Life, oblivious to his grief, continued. Rosen and Ben Yakov returned to Paris with the rest of the students of the Ecole Speciale, Rosen in a state of chronic rage over what had happened and was still happening in Czechoslovakia, Ben Yakov pale with love for a girl he'd met in Italy that summer, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi in Florence. He had vowed to bring the girl to Paris as his bride; he'd taken a job reshelving books at the Bibliotheque Nationale to save money for that purpose. Rosen had a new passion, too: He had joined the Ligue Internationale Contre l'Antisemitisme, and was consumed with rallies and meetings. Andras himself had less time than ever to consider his situation with Klara. With the help of Vago's recommendation, he had been offered the architecture internship for which he'd applied in the spring. He'd had to cut back his hours at Forestier's, but there was a small stipend to make up for the loss of income. Now, three afternoons a week, he found himself at the elbow of an architect named Georges Lemain, playing the junior intern's role of plan-filer, pencil-line-eraser, black-coffee-fetcher, calculation-maker. Lemain was a ruler-narrow man with a sleek head of clipped gray hair. He spoke rapid metallic French and drew with machinelike precision. Often he infuriated his colleagues by singing operatic airs as he worked. As a result he'd been sequestered in a far corner of the office, walled off by bookshelves filled with back issues of
L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui
. As Andras worked at his own lowly desk beside Lemain's great drawing table, he learned the airs and could soon sing them on his own. In return for his tolerance and diligence, Lemain began to help Andras with his school assignments. His fleet-looking angles of glass and polished planes of stone began to find their way into Andras's designs. He encouraged Andras to keep a portfolio of private sketches, work that had nothing to do with his Ecole Speciale projects; he urged Andras to show him ideas that he'd been developing. And so, one afternoon in late October, Andras ventured to bring in the plans for the summer house in Nice. Lemain spread the plans on his own worktable and bent over the elevations.

"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 you probably never cared for her at all, did you? You wanted to be her lover, but you didn't really want to know her."

"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.