Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Klara is an intelligent woman,” Andras said. “Perhaps she could help us see a way through this.”

“I have the most profound admiration for my sister’s intelligence,” Hász said. “She’s managed brilliantly in adverse circumstances. But I don’t want these concerns to weigh upon her. I want her to feel safe as long as she can.”

“So do I,” Andras said. “But, as you observed, I’m not in the habit of keeping secrets from my wife.”

“You’ve got to promise me you won’t speak to her about it. I don’t like to place you in a position of incomplete honesty, but in this situation I find I have no choice.”

“You mean to say that I have no choice.”

“Understand me, Andras. We’ve invested a great deal in Klara’s safety already. If you were to tell her now, it might all have been in vain.”

“What if it were my wife’s wish not to bring her family to ruin?”

“What else can we do? Would you prefer that she turn herself in? Or that she risk her own life and your child’s in an escape attempt?” He got to his feet and paced before the fireplace. “I assure you I’ve considered the problem from every angle. I see no other course. I beg you to respect my judgment, Andras. You must believe that I have some insight into Klara’s character too.”

Though it still seemed a betrayal, Andras agreed to keep his silence. In fact he had no other choice; he had no money of his own, no high connections, no way to step between Klara and the law. And he was to leave again for Bánhida in the morning. At least the current arrangement would keep Klara protected while he was away. He thanked Hász for his pledge to see what might be done for Mátyás, and they parted with handshakes and serious looks that suggested they would move through this difficulty with the stoicism of Hungarian men. But as Andras left the house on Benczúr utca the news struck him again with all its original force. He felt as if he were walking through a different city, one that had lain all this time just behind the city he had known; the feeling brought to mind Monsieur Forestier’s stage sets, those palimpsestic architectures in which the familiar concealed the strange and terrifying. In this inside-out reality, the secret of Klara’s identity had become a secret kept from her, rather than one held by her; now Andras, no longer deceived, had agreed to become his wife’s deceiver.

He thought it might calm his nerves to go down to the river and stand on the Széchenyi Bridge. He needed some time to arrange the situation in his mind before he went home to Klara. How long after he’d entered the work service, he wondered, had Madame Novak gone to the authorities? Was it merely the memory of past wrongs that had sent her there, or had there been a more recent wound? What did he really know of the present situation between Klara and Novak? Was it possible that, despite György’s reassurances, Andras had been betrayed? A jolt of nausea went through him, and he had to stop at the curb and sit down. A stray mutt sniffed around his ankles; when he extended a hand toward the dog it drew back and ran away. He got up and pulled his coat closer, tightened his muffler around his throat. From Benczúr utca he walked to Bajza utca, and from Bajza to the tree-lined stretch of Andrássy út, where pedestrians huddled against the chilly wind and the streetcar sounded its familiar bell. But as he walked down Andrássy he found himself becoming increasingly anxious, and he realized that it was because he was approaching the Opera House, where, as far as he knew, Zoltán Novak was still director. It had been more than two years since he’d seen Novak; the party at Marcelle’s had been the last time. He wondered if the wounds Novak had suffered that night could have moved him to a cruel and subtle act-if he might have brought Klara’s peril to his wife’s attention, might have betrayed Klara through his knowledge that Edith would want to be rid of her. Andras stopped on the street before the Operaház and considered what he might say to Novak that very moment if he could walk into the man’s office and confront him. What accusations might he make, what would Novak admit? The knot of connection among the three of them, himself and Novak and Klara, was so convoluted that to pull at any one of its strands was to draw the whole mess tighter. It was possible that if Andras walked into that building he might emerge with the knowledge that Klara had betrayed him, had been unfaithful to him for months-even that the child she was carrying was not his own. But wasn’t it worse to stand outside in ignorance, worse to return to Bánhida and not know? The doors of the Operaház were open to the brisk afternoon; he could see men and women inside, waiting in line at the boxoffice window. He drew a breath and went in.

How many months had passed, he wondered, since he’d been inside a theater? It had been since his last summer in Paris-he and Klara had gone to see a dress rehearsal of La Fille Mal Gardée. Now he walked in through one of the Romanesque doorways of the performance space and made his way down the carpeted aisle. Onstage, the curtains had been drawn aside to reveal an Italian village square with a white marble fountain at its center. The buildings surrounding it were made of fake stone cut from yellow-painted pasteboard, with awnings of green-and-white-striped canvas. A carpenter bent over a set of steps leading into one of the buildings; the sound of his hammer in the open space of the auditorium gave Andras a pang of nostalgia. How he wished he were arriving here to install a set, or even to set up a coffee table for the actors and deliver their messages and fetch them when it was time to go onstage. How he wished he had a deskful of half-finished drawings waiting for him at home, a studio deadline looming in the near distance.

He ran to the front of the auditorium and climbed the steps at the side of the stage. The carpenter didn’t look up from his work. In the wings, a man who must have been the properties master was arranging props on their shelves; the whine of an electric saw rose from the set-building shop, and the smell of fresh-cut wood came to Andras with its layered suggestions of his father’s lumberyard and the Sarah-Bernhardt and Monsieur Forestier’s workshop and the labor camp in Subcarpathia. He wandered farther into the back hallways of the theater, up a set of stairs to the dressing rooms; the whitewashed doors, with their copperplate-lettered names in brass cardholders, chastely hid the disasters of makeup boxes and stained dressing gowns and plumed hats and torn stockings and dog-eared scripts and moldering armchairs and cracked mirrors and wilted bouquets that he knew must lie on the other side. When Klara had been a girl, he realized, she must have dressed for her performances in one of these rooms. He remembered a photograph from those days, Klara in a skirt of tattered leaves, her hair interwoven with twigs like a woodland fairy’s. He could almost see her sylphid shadow slipping across the hall from one room to another.

He walked down the hallway and climbed a flight of stairs; at the top, a hallway held another row of dressing rooms. The hall ended at a wooden door with a white enameled nameplate, the same one Novak had used at the Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris. There were the familiar words etched in black paint, their gold highlights and curlicues dimmed by the travel between Paris and Budapest: Zoltán Novak, Directeur. From behind the door came a deep cough. Andras raised a hand to knock, then let it drop. Now that he had arrived at this threshold, his courage had fled. He had no idea what he would say to Zoltán Novak. From within came another deep cough, and then a third, closer. The door opened, and Andras found himself face-to-face with Novak himself. He was pale, wasted, his eyes bright with what appeared to be fever; his moustache drooped, and his suit hung loose on his frame. When he saw Andras before him his shoulders went slack.