Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Not really.” She frowned at her knees. “I’m thirty-four, you know. The birth was a near disaster last time. The obstetrician says my womb may have been damaged. My mother came to my last appointment, and I wish now that she hadn’t. She’s been driving herself mad with worry.”

“Why, Klara? Is there a danger to the baby?” He took her chin and made her raise her eyes to him. “Are you in danger yourself?”

“Women give birth every day,” she said, and tried to smile.

“What did the doctor say?”

“He says there’s a risk of complication. He wants me to have the child at the hospital.”

“Of course you’ll have it at the hospital,” Andras said. “I don’t care what it costs. We’ll find a way to pay.”

“My brother will help,” she said.

“I’ll get work,” Andras said. “We’ll make the money somehow.”

“György wouldn’t begrudge us anything,” Klara said. “No more than your own brothers would.”

Andras didn’t want to argue, not during the brief time they had together. “I know he’d help if we needed it,” he said. “Let’s hope we don’t have to ask him.”

“My mother wants me to move home to Benczúr utca,” Klara said, twisting her wet hair into a rope. “She doesn’t understand why I insist that you and I must have our own apartment. She thinks it’s a needless expense. And she doesn’t like me to be alone. What if something were to happen? she says. As if I hadn’t spent all those years alone in Paris.”

“She wants to protect you all the more, because of that,” he said. “It must have tortured her not to be with you when you were pregnant with Elisabet.”

“I understand, of course. But I’m not a child of fifteen anymore.”

“Perhaps she’s right, though. If there’s a danger, wouldn’t it be better for you to be at home?”

“Not you, too, Andráska!”

“I hate to think of you being alone.”

“I’m not alone. Ilana is here with me almost every day. And I can walk to my mother’s house in six minutes. But I can’t live there again, and not just because I’m accustomed to being on my own. What if the authorities were to discover who I am? If I were living in my family’s house, they’d be directly implicated.”

“Ah, Klara! How I wish you didn’t have to think about any of this.”

“And how I wish you didn’t either,” she said. And then she stood from the bath, and the water fell from her skin in a glittering curtain, and he followed the new curves of her body with his hands.

Later that night, when he found he couldn’t sleep, he got out of bed and went into the sitting room, to the drafting table Klara had bought for him; he ran his hands over that smooth hard surface devoid of paper or tools. There was a time when he might have comforted himself with work, even if it were just a project he had set himself; the pure concentration required to draw a series of fine unbroken black lines could turn his mind aside, even if just for a few moments, from the gravest of problems. But the fact was that he’d never before had to worry about the fate of his pregnant wife and his unborn child and the entire Western world. In any case, there was no project he could imagine taking up now; when it came to the study and practice of architecture, his mind was as blank and planless as the drafting table before him. The work he’d done those past two years when he wasn’t cutting trees or building roads or shoveling coal-scratching in notebooks, doodling in the margins of Mendel’s newspapers-might have kept his hands from lying idle; it might even have kept him from going mad. But it had also been a distraction from the fact that his life as a student of architecture was slipping farther and farther away, his hands losing their memory of how to make a perfect line, his mind losing its ability to solve problems of form and function. How far away he felt now from that atelier at the École Spéciale where he and Polaner had suspended a running track from the roof of a sports club. How astounding that such an idea had occurred to them. It seemed an eternity since he’d looked at a building with any thought in his mind beside the hope that its roof wouldn’t leak and that it would keep out the wind. He’d hardly even taken note of what the façade of this building looked like.

He wished he could talk to Tibor. He would know what Andras should do, how he might protect Klara and begin to reclaim his life. But Tibor was three hundred kilometers away in the Carpathians. Andras couldn’t imagine when they might next sit down together to make sense of who they were now, or at least to take some comfort in their shared uncertainty.

As it happened, it was his younger brother-the one whose function had always been to cause trouble, rather than to alleviate it-who materialized in Budapest during Andras’s furlough. Mátyás rolled into Nyugati Station with the rest of his company, which had been posted nearby while it awaited a transfer, and jumped off the train to enjoy a furlough of his own making. His company was directed by a lax young officer who allowed his men to buy an occasional exemption from work. Mátyás, who had hoarded money during his window-trimming days, had bought a few days off to see a shopgirl he’d met on one of his jobs. He had no idea that Andras was home on furlough, too, and so it was purely by accident that, on Monday afternoon, Mátyás jumped onto the back of a streetcar and found himself face-to-face with his brother. He was so surprised that he would have fallen off again if Andras hadn’t grabbed his arm and held him.

“What are you doing here?” Mátyás cried. “You’re supposed to be slaving at a mine.”

“And you’re supposed to be-doing what?”

“Building bridges. But not today! Today I’m going to see a girl named Serafina.”

An elderly woman in a kerchief gave them a disapproving look, as if they ought to know better than to engage in such loud and animated conversation on a streetcar. But Andras pulled Mátyás’s face close to his own and said to the woman, “It’s my brother, do you see? My brother!”

“You must have had donkeys for parents,” the woman said.

“Pardon us, your ladyship,” Mátyás said. He tipped his hat and executed a perfect backflip from the side rail of the streetcar to the pavement, so swiftly that the woman gave a little scream. As the passengers watched in astonishment, he tapped out a soft-shoe rhythm against the cobblestones and then fleetfooted his way up onto the curb, scattering the pedestrians there; he turned a double spin, whipped off his hat, and bowed to a young woman in a blue twill coat. Everyone who’d seen him gave a cheer. Andras jumped down from the streetcar and waited until his brother had finished taking his curtain calls.

“Needless foolishness,” Andras said, once the applause had died down.

“I must emblazon that on a flag and carry it everywhere.”

“You might well. Then everyone would have some warning.”

“Where are you going with a market bag full of potatoes?” Mátyás asked.

“Home to my apartment, where my wife is waiting for me.”

“Your apartment? What apartment?”

“Thirty-five Nefelejcs utca, third floor, apartment B.”

“Since when do you live there? And for how long?”

“Since last night. And for another day and a half, until I have to go back to Bánhida.”

Mátyás laughed. “Then I suppose I caught you by your shirttails.”

“Or I caught you. Why don’t you come for dinner?”

“I might be otherwise engaged.”

“And what if this Serafina sees you for the glib young fool you are?”

“In that case I’ll come over at once.” Mátyás kissed Andras on both cheeks and hopped aboard the next streetcar, which by that time had pulled up beside them.