Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“My brothers have beautiful wives,” he said. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous.”

“Well, I’d be rather disappointed if you weren’t.”

“You’re truly going to be a father?”

“So it seems.”

He let out a low whistle. “Excited?”

“Terrified.”

“Nonsense. You’ll be wonderful. And Klara’s been through it once before.”

“Her child wasn’t born during a war,” Andras said.

“No, but she didn’t have a husband then, either.”

“She didn’t seem so much the worse for it. She got work. She raised her daughter. Elisabet might have been a more pleasant girl if she’d had a different sort of family-a brother or sister to play with, and a father to stop her from being so unkind to her mother. But she turned out all right, after all. I’m not much use as a husband. So far I’ve been nothing but a weight around Klara’s neck.”

“You were drafted,” Mátyás said. “You had to serve. It’s not as though you had any choice.”

“I haven’t finished my studies. I can’t come home and start working as an architect.”

“Then you’ll go back to school.”

“If I can get into school. And then there’s the time and expense.”

“What you need,” Mátyás said, “is some well-paid work that doesn’t take all your time. Why not go into business with me?”

“What, as a tap dancer? Do you imagine us as a performing team? The Amazing Lévi Brothers?”

“No, you dolt. We’ll be a team of window-trimmers. The work will go twice as fast with two of us doing it. I’ll be the stylist. You’ll be my slave. We’ll get double the clients.”

“I don’t know if I could take orders from you,” Andras said. “You’d break my back.”

“What’ll you do for money, then? Sit on a street corner and make caricatures?”

“I’ve been thinking,” Andras said. “My old friend Mendel Horovitz worked at the Budapest Evening Courier before he went into the labor service. He says they’re always looking for layout artists and illustrators. And the pay’s not bad.”

“Akh. But then you’d just be someone else’s slave.”

“If I’ve got to be someone’s slave, I might as well do it in a field where I’ve got experience.”

“What experience?”

“Well, there was my old job at Past and Future. And then there are the newspapers Mendel and I have been making, the ones I wrote you about. I would have brought you a copy if I’d known I was going to see you.”

“I understand,” Mátyás said. “Window-trimming isn’t fancy enough work for you. Not after your Paris education.” He was teasing, but his expression betrayed a flicker of pique. Andras remembered the fierce letters Mátyás had written from Debrecen while Andras was in Paris-the ones in which Mátyás had claimed his own share of an education. Then the war had begun, and Mátyás had been stuck in Hungary, working first at window-trimming and then in the Munkaszolgálat. Andras was ashamed to realize that he did feel as if he should have moved beyond a job like window-trimming, which carried a flavor of commercial servitude. It was the wild luck of his last months in Paris that had made him feel that way, the kindness of his professors and his mentors that had led him to expect something different. But that was behind him now. He needed to earn money. In a few months he would be a father.

“Forgive me,” Andras said. “I didn’t mean to suggest your work wasn’t an art. It’s a higher art than newspaper illustration, that’s for certain.”

Mátyás’s look seemed to soften, and he put a hand on his brother’s arm. “That’s all right,” he said. “I might think myself too fine for window-trimming, too, if Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret had been my drinking companions.”

“We were never drinking companions,” Andras said.

“Don’t try to go in for humility now.”

“Oh, all right. We were great friends. We drank together constantly.” He fell silent, thinking of his real friends, the ones who were scattered across the Western Hemisphere now. Those men were his brothers too. But there hadn’t been word from Ben Yakov after that conciliatory telegram, nor from Polaner since he’d joined the Foreign Legion. Andras wondered what had happened to the photograph that had been taken when he and Polaner had won the Prix du Amphithéâtre. It seemed strange to think it might still exist somewhere, a record of a vanished life.

“You look grim, brother,” Mátyás said. “Do we need to get some wine into you?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Andras said.

So they went to a café overlooking the artificial lake, the one that became a skating rink in winter, and they sat at a table outside and ordered Tokaji. The war had made wine expensive, but Mátyás insisted upon the indulgence and further insisted upon paying, since he didn’t have a wife or future child to support. He promised to let Andras pay the next time, once he’d landed a job at a newspaper, though of course neither of them knew when that might happen, or even when they might next be home together.

“Now, who’s this Serafina?” Andras asked, looking at his brother through the amber lens of his glass of Tokaji. “And when will we meet her?”

“She’s a seamstress at a dress shop on Váci utca.”

“And?”

“And, I met her when I was working on a window. She was wearing a white dress embroidered with cherries. I made her take it off so I could put it in the window display.”

“You made her take her dress off?”

“Do you see why it might be an attractive job?”

“Did she go back to her sewing machine naked?”

“No. Sadly, the dressmaker had something else for her to put on.”

“Now, that’s a shame.”

“Yes. I’ve felt the sting of it ever since. That’s why I decided to pursue her. I wanted to see what I missed when she stepped behind the changing-room curtain.”

“You must have seen enough to make it seem worth the pursuit.”

“Plenty. She’s what I like. Just a shade taller than me. Black hair cut into a neat little cap. And a mole on her cheek like a spot of brown ink.”

“Well, I can’t wait to make her acquaintance.”

Again, the glint of mirth faded out of Mátyás’s eyes; the faint shadows beneath them seemed to deepen as he looked down into his glass of wine. “I’m going to follow my company tomorrow,” he said. “We’re off to the big party.”

“What big party?”

“Belgorod, in Russia. The front lines.”

A terrible clang in Andras’s chest, as though the bell of his ribcage had been struck with an iron hammer. “Oh, Mátyás. No.”

“Yes,” Mátyás said. He looked up and grinned, but his expression was one of fear. “So you see, it’s a good thing we ran into each other.”

“Can’t you get a transfer? Have you tried?”

“Money’s the only way, and I’ve only got enough for small bribes.”

“How much would it cost?”

“Oh, I don’t know. At this point, hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

Andras thought again of György Hász in his villa on Benczúr utca, where he was most likely sitting by the fire in a cashmere robe and reading one of the financial papers. He wanted to take Hász and turn him upside down, shake him until gold coins rained out of him as if from a broken bank. He could think of no reason why that man’s son should have a painting studio and a stretch of leisure-filled months ahead, while Mátyás Lévi, son of Lucky Béla of Konyár, had to go to the Eastern Front and take his chances in the minefields. He, Andras, would be a fool, worse than a fool, if he allowed his pride to keep him from applying to György for help. This wasn’t a matter of whether or not Andras could support Klara and their child; Mátyás’s life was at stake.