Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

The building entrance was a green door set with a leaded glass window. Andras rang the bell and waited. Through the sheer panel that covered the window, he could see a stout woman descending a flight of stairs. She opened the door and put a hand on her hip, giving him an appraising look. She was red-faced, kerchiefed, with a deep smell of paprika about her, like the women who brought vegetables and goat’s milk to sell at the market in Debrecen.

“Madame Morgenstern?” he said, with hesitation; she didn’t look much like a ballet mistress.

“Hah! No,” she said in Hungarian. “Come in and close the door behind you. You’ll let in the cold.”

So he must have passed her inspection; he was glad, because the smells coming from inside were making him dizzy with hunger. He stepped into the entry, and the woman continued in a rapid stream of Hungarian as she took his coat and hat. What an enormous lot of flowers. She would see if there was a vase upstairs large enough to hold them. Lunch was nearly ready. She had prepared stuffed cabbage, and she hoped he liked it, because there was nothing else, except for spaetzle and a fruit compote and some sliced cold chicken and a walnut strudel. He should follow her upstairs. Her name was Mrs. Apfel. They climbed to the second floor, where she directed him to a front parlor decorated with worn Turkish rugs and dark furniture; she told him to wait there for Madame Morgenstern.

He sat on a gray velvet settee and took a long breath. Beneath the heady smell of stuffed cabbage there was the dry lemony tang of furniture polish and a faint scent of licorice. On a small carved table before him was a candy dish, a cut-glass nest filled with pink and lilac sugar eggs. He took an egg and ate it: anise. He straightened his tie and made sure the cotton backing wasn’t showing. After a moment he heard the click of heels in the hallway. A slim shadow moved across the wall, and a girl entered with a blue glass vase in her hands. The vase bristled with a wild profusion of flowers and branches and fake bluebirds, the daylilies beginning to darken at their edges, the roses hanging heavy on their stems. From behind this mass of fading blooms the girl looked at Andras, her dark hair brushed like a wing across her forehead.

“Thank you for the flowers,” she said in French.

As she set the vase on the sideboard, he saw she wasn’t a girl at all; her features had the sharper angles of an adult woman’s, and she held her back straight as if from decades of ballet training. But she was lithe and small, her hands like a child’s on the blue glass vase. Andras drank in a flood of embarrassment as he watched her arrange the bouquet. Why had he brought so many half-dead flowers? Why the bluebirds? Why all those branches? Why hadn’t he just bought something simple at the corner market? A dozen daisies? A sheaf of lupines? How much could it have cost? A couple of francs? The wood nymph smiled back at him over her shoulder, then came to shake his hand.

“Claire Morgenstern,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Mr. Lévi. Madame Gérard has had many kind things to say about you.”

He took her hand, trying not to stare; she looked decades younger than he’d imagined. He’d envisioned her as a woman of Madame Gérard’s age, but this woman couldn’t have been more than thirty. She had a quiet, astonishing beauty-fine bones, a mouth like a smooth pink-skinned fruit, large intelligent gray eyes. Claire Morgenstern: So this was the C. of the letter, not some elderly gentleman who had once been Mrs. Hász’s lover. Her large gray eyes were Mrs. Hász’s eyes, the quiet grief he saw there a mirror of the expression he’d seen in the older woman’s eyes. This Claire Morgenstern had to be Mrs. Hász’s daughter. A long moment passed before Andras could speak.

“The pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said in rushed and stilted French, knowing he’d gotten it wrong as soon as he said it. Belatedly he remembered to rise, and though he struggled for the right words, found himself continuing in the same vein. “Thank you for the invitation of me,” he stammered, and sat down again.

Madame Morgenstern took a seat beside him on a low chair. “Would you rather speak Hungarian?” she asked in Hungarian. “We can, if you like.”

He looked up at her as if from the bottom of a well. “French is fine,” he said, in Hungarian. And then in French, again, “French is fine.”

“All right, then,” she said. “You’ll have to tell me what Hungary is like these days. It’s been years since I was there, and Elisabet has never been.”

As if she’d been conjured by the mention of her name, a tall stern-looking girl entered the room, carrying a pitcher of iced tea. She was broad-shouldered like the swimmers Andras had admired at Palatinus Strand in Budapest; she gave him a look of impatient disdain as she filled his glass.

“This is my Elisabet,” said Madame Morgenstern. “Elisabet, this is Andras.”

Andras couldn’t make himself believe that this girl was Madame Morgenstern’s daughter. In Elisabet’s hands, the tea pitcher looked like a child’s toy. He drank his tea and looked from mother to daughter. Madame Morgenstern stirred her tea with a long spoon, while Elisabet, having set the pitcher on a table, threw herself into a wing chair and checked her wristwatch.

“If we don’t eat now I’ll be late for the movie,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet Marthe in an hour.”

“What movie?” Andras said, searching for a thread of conversation.

“You wouldn’t be interested,” Elisabet said. “It’s in French.”

“But I speak French,” Andras said.

Elisabet gave him a dry smile. “May-juh-pargl-Fronsay,” she said.

Madame Morgenstern closed her eyes. “Elisabet,” she said.

“What?”

“You know what.”

“I just want to go to the movies,” Elisabet said, and knocked her heels dully against the rug. Then she tilted her chin toward Andras and said, “Lovely tie.”

Andras looked down. His tie had flipped over as he’d leaned forward to take his glass of tea, and now the cotton backing faced the world, while the gold partridges flew unseen against his shirtfront. Hot with shame, he turned it around and stared into his tea.

“Lunch is served!” said the red-faced Mrs. Apfel from the doorway, pushing back her kerchief. “Come now, before the cabbage gets cold.”

…

There was a proper dining room, with polished wooden china cabinets and a white cloth on the table: echoes of the house on Benczúr utca, Andras thought. But there were no exsanguinated sandwiches here; the table was heavy with platters of stuffed cabbage and chicken and bowls of spaetzle, as though there were eight of them eating instead of three. Madame Morgenstern sat at the head of the table, Andras and Elisabet across from each other. Mrs. Apfel served the stuffed cabbage and spaetzle; Andras, grateful for the distraction, tucked his napkin into his collar and began to eat. Elisabet frowned at her plate. She pushed the cabbage aside and began eating the spaetzle, one tiny dumpling at a time.

“I hear you’re interested in mathematics,” Andras said, speaking to the top of Elisabet’s lowered head.

She raised her eyes. “Did my mother tell you that?”

“No, Madame Gérard did. She said you won a competition.”

“Anyone can do high-school mathematics.”

“Do you think you’ll want to study it in college?”

Elisabet shrugged. “If I go to college.”

“Darling, you can’t live on spaetzle,” Madame Morgenstern said quietly, looking at Elisabet’s plate. “You used to like stuffed cabbage.”

“It’s cruel to eat meat,” Elisabet said, and leveled her eyes at Andras. “I’ve seen how they butcher cows. They stick a knife in the neck and draw it downwards, like this, and the blood pours out. My biology class took a trip to a shochet. It’s barbaric.”