The Invisible Bridge (39 page)

"Look how you've turned out," she said, and touched his lapel. "A gentleman after all. Evening dress suits you. I may have a terrible fit of jealousy before the night is over."

"It was kind of you to invite me," Andras said. He heard the forced calm in his own voice, and he thought he saw the hint of a smile at the corner of Madame Gerard's mouth.

"It was kind of you to indulge me on my birthday," she said. And then, more pointedly: "You'll enjoy the company, I believe. Our friend Monsieur Novak is here with his wife. Have you heard they're to return to Hungary?" She tilted her head toward a corner of the room, where Novak and his wife stood talking to a silver-haired man in a cravat. "I must say, he reacted with some surprise when I told him you and Klara would be here. I imagine you must know all about ...?"

"Yes, I know
all about,"
he said. "Though I'm sure you'd rather I hadn't. It would have entertained you, wouldn't it, to have been able to tell me yourself."

"I've only ever looked out for your well-being," Madame Gerard said. "I warned you about getting involved with Klara. I must say I was astonished to hear that things had become so serious between you. I was certain she viewed you as a kind of entertainment."

Andras felt the heat rising beneath his skin. "And is this
your
idea of an entertainment?" he said. "To invite people to your house and then insult them?"

"Lower your voice, darling," Madame Gerard said. "You attribute too much cleverness to me. How is one to keep straight everyone else's romantic intrigues? If I'd invited only those of my friends whose connections were uncomplicated, I couldn't have invited anyone at all!"

"I know you better than that," Andras said. "I don't think you do anything by mistake."

"Well, I can see you've got me thoroughly romanticized," she said, obviously pleased. "What a charming young man you are."

"And when exactly does Monsieur Novak depart for Hungary?" he asked.

She gave her low dissonant laugh. "January," she said. "I can't imagine you'll be sad to see him go. Though I'm not certain how Klara will take it. They were very close, you understand." She handed him a glass of whiskey with ice, and turned her head toward Klara, who had taken a seat beside Novak on a low black sofa. "You mustn't worry what people will say about the two of you, by the way--about your engagement, I mean.

Everyone loves Klara's eccentricities. I find the situation irresistible myself. It's like a fairy tale! Look at you. She's turned you from a frog into a prince."

"If that's all," he said, "I'll bring Klara a drink."

"You'd better," Madame Gerard said. "In another moment
he'll
be obliged to get one for her." She turned her gaze again to the low black sofa, where Novak was explaining something to Klara in urgent tones. Klara shook her head, smiling sadly; Novak seemed to press his point, and Klara lowered her eyes.

Andras got her a glass of wine and made his way through a cluster of dinner guests in evening dress; he brushed past Novak's wife, Edith, a tall, dark-haired woman in a velvet gown, redolent of jasmine perfume. The last time he'd seen her, almost a year earlier at the Sarah-Bernhardt, she'd handed him her bag while she searched her pockets for a handkerchief. She'd given him no more regard than if he'd been a hook on the wall.

Now she held her back rigid while another women leaned close to her ear; it was clear that the other woman was narrating the progression of Novak's tete-a-tete with Klara.

When Andras reached the sofa, Monsieur Novak got to his feet and held out a damp red hand for Andras to shake. His eyes were raw, his breathing labored. After his first words of greeting he seemed unable to introduce a subject of conversation.

"I understand you're going home to Budapest," Andras said.

Novak smiled with obvious effort. "Yes, indeed," he said. "And what will I do this time for a lunchtime companion? Madame Novak prefers the dining car."

"You'll probably cheer up some young fool on his way from Paris to Budapest."

"Fool indeed, if he's young and heading back to Budapest."

"Budapest is a fine place for a young man," Andras said.

"Perhaps you ought to have stayed there, then," Novak said, leaning a shade too close to Andras; in an instant Andras knew he was drunk. By now Klara knew, too, of course; she stood and placed a hand on Novak's sleeve. A flash of resentment kindled in Andras's chest. If Novak was going to undo himself, Klara shouldn't feel under an obligation to protect him. But she gave Andras a look that begged forbearance, and he had to relent. He couldn't fault Novak. It had been only three months, after all, since his own bout of drunken howling at Jozsef Hasz's flat.

"Monsieur Novak was telling me about his new position with the Royal Hungarian Opera," Klara said.

"Ah, yes. They're lucky to have you," Andras said.

"Well, Paris won't miss me," Novak said, looking pointedly at Klara. "That much is evident."

Madame Gerard had crossed the room to join their group, and she took Novak's hands in her own. "We shall all miss you terribly," she said. "It's a great loss to us. A great loss to
me
. What will I do without you? Who will preside at my dinner parties?"

"You
will preside, as always," Novak said.

"Not 'as always,'" she said. "I used to be morbidly shy. You used to do all the talking for me. But perhaps you don't remember that. Perhaps you don't remember how you were forced to ply me with wine in your office, just to convince me to take Madame Villareal-Bloch's role."

"Ah, yes, poor Claudine," Novak said, his voice rising in volume as he spoke.

"She was brilliant, and she threw it all away for that boy. That press attache from Brazil.

She followed him to Sao Paolo, and then he dropped her for a young tart." He turned a glare upon Andras. "And she was so certain he loved her. But he made a fool of her." He drained his glass, then went toward the window and stared down into the street.

A wave of silence spread from Novak to the rest of the guests; conversation faltered in one small group after another. It seemed they'd all been watching the exchange between Andras and Klara and Novak; it was almost as though they'd been notified of the situation in advance, and advised to pay particular attention. At last an elderly woman in a black Mainbocher gown cleared her throat delicately, fortified herself with a sip of gin, and declared that she had just heard that the forty thousand railroad workers fired by Monsieur Reynaud
would
stage a protest, and that the only good that might come of it would be that Monsieur and Madame Novak's departure might be delayed.

"Oh, but that would be terrible," said Madame Novak. "Mother is giving a party to welcome us, and the invitations have already been sent."

Madame Gerard laughed. "No one could ever accuse you of being a populist, Edith," she said, and the conversation soon resumed its former pace.

At dinner, Andras found himself seated between Madame Novak and the elderly woman in the Mainbocher gown. Andras found Madame Novak's jasmine perfume so overpowering that it seemed to lace the flavor of every dish set before him; he ate jasmine terrapin soup, jasmine sorbet, jasmine pheasant. Klara was seated beside Novak down the table to Andras's right, where it was impossible for him to see her face. The talk at the table was at first of Madame Gerard: her career and her new apartment and her enduring beauty. Marcelle listened with poorly acted modesty, her mouth slipping into a self-satisfied smile. When she'd grown bored of basking in flattery she turned the conversation to Budapest, its charms and difficulties and how it had changed since the Hungarians among them had lived there in their youth. She kept beginning her sentences by saying, "When we were Monsieur Levi's age." A Captain Something-von-Other seated across from Andras declared that Europe would be at war before long, and that Hungary must be involved, and that Budapest would undergo profound changes before the decade closed. Madame Novak voiced the hope that the park where she'd played as a child would not be altered, at least; that was where she intended for her own child to play.

"Isn't that right?" she asked her husband across the table. "I'll have Janos's nurse take him there as soon as we get to town."

"Where, my dear?"

"The park on Pozsonyi ut, at the river's edge."

"Of course," said Novak absently, turning again to Klara.

The dinner concluded with cheeses and port, and the guests retired to a buff-walled room that held velvet settees and a Victrola. Madame Gerard demanded that they have dancing. The settees were moved aside, a record placed upon the Victrola, and the guests began swaying to a new American song, "They Can't Take That Away from Me."

Monsieur Novak took Klara by the waist and led her to the center of the room. They danced awkwardly, Klara with her hands braced against Novak's arms, Novak trying to lower his head onto her shoulder. Madame Novak, willfully oblivious, danced a jerky jazz step with Captain Something-von-Other, and Andras found himself partnered with the elderly woman in black.
The way you wear your hat
, she sang into Andras's ear.
The
way you sip your tea. The memory of all that--no, they can't take that away from me
.

"It's about lost love!" she said, when he protested that his English was terrible.

She seemed to think she had to shout into his ear in order to be heard above the music and conversation. "The man is parted from the woman, but he'll never forget her! She haunts his dreams! She's changed his life!"

No one could get enough of the song. Madame Gerard declared it her new favorite. They played it four times before they tired of it. Andras danced with Madame Gerard, and with Edith Novak, and with the elderly woman again; but Zoltan Novak would not release Klara. In a short time he would leave Paris forever; nothing could prevent that--not a rail strike, nor the threat of war, nor the force of his own love. Klara tried to extricate herself from his arms, but each time she pulled away he protested so loudly she had to stay with him to avoid a scene. Finally, too drunk to stand, he stumbled back onto a settee and wiped his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Madame Gerard took the record from the turntable and announced that the birthday cake would now be served, and Klara motioned Andras into a hallway.

"Let's go," she whispered. "We should never have come. I should have known Marcelle would arrange some horrible drama."

He was only too eager to leave. They retrieved their coats from a red bedroom and slipped out into the hall. But Novak must have missed Klara, and then heard the lift descending; or perhaps he had just decided he couldn't bear the heat of the room any longer. When they emerged onto the sidewalk he was there on the balcony, calling out to Klara as she and Andras walked arm in arm down the street. Andras, far from feeling any triumph, was sick with empathy. It seemed just as likely that he himself might have been the one she was leaving behind forever, the one who'd been sent back to Hungary without her, and the feeling was so strong he had to sit down on a bench and put his head between his knees. It was a fresh shock to feel her close beside him, her gloved hand on his shoulder. They sat there on the bench in the cold for what seemed a long time, neither of them speaking a word.

ON A DAY of knifelike December wind, the Ligue Internationale Contre l'Antisemitisme staged a protest against the German foreign minister's visit to Paris.

Andras and Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov stood in a tight group of demonstrators outside the Elysee Palace, shouting slogans of protest against the French and German governments, waving signs--
NOFRIENDSHIP WITHFASCISTS;
VONRIBBENTROPGOHOME
--and singing the Zionist songs they'd learned at earlier meetings of the Ligue, which Rosen had insisted they all join after the pogrom in Germany. That morning he had woken them at dawn to paint placards. There could be no excuse for passivity, he said as he dragged them from their beds, no excuse for lying around while Joachim von Ribbentrop prepared to sign a nonaggression treaty with France; Bonnet, the French foreign minister who had been so accommodating about Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland, had arranged it all. At Rosen's they drank a pot of Turkish coffee and made a dozen signs, Rosen stirring the paint with a ruler and insisting they all breathe the fumes of revolution. Andras knew Rosen's performance was largely for the benefit of his new
copine
, a Zionist nursing student whom he'd met that summer.

The girl, Shalhevet, had joined them that morning to make the signs. She was tall and fierce-eyed, with a heartbreaking lock of white in her black hair; her occasional winks at Andras and Polaner and Ben Yakov suggested she knew how absurd Rosen could be, but she watched him with an admiration that betrayed her deeper feelings.

Though Andras had complained at being dragged from bed, he was glad to be called upon to do something more substantial than read the newspaper and lament its contents. As he stood outside the Elysee Palace holding his sign aloft, he thought of the young Grynszpan in Fresnes prison--what he must have been feeling at that moment, and whether or not he knew France was welcoming the German foreign minister that day. At noon, von Ribbentrop's black limousine pulled up to the gates of the palace and was quickly ushered through. While the police watched warily and guarded the barricades around the palace, the Friendship Declaration was signed. There was nothing the protesters could have done to stop it from happening, but they'd made their feelings known. After the foreign minister had departed again, the Ligue marched all the way to the river, shouting and singing. And at the quai des Tuileries Andras and his friends broke away to end their afternoon at the Blue Dove, where the talk was not of politics but of their other favorite subject. Ben Yakov, it seemed, faced a terrible problem: Despite all his efforts, he'd only managed to save two thirds of the money he needed to bring his Florentine bride back to Paris--to steal her away, as Rosen said. And time was of the essence; they couldn't wait any longer. In another month she would be married to the old goat to whom her parents had promised her.