Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Not really,” Andras said. “My brothers and I used to know the kosher butcher in our town. He was a friend of our father’s, and he was quite gentle with the animals.”

Elisabet watched him intently. “And can you explain to me how you gently butcher a cow?” she said. “What did he do? Pet them to death?”

“He used the traditional method,” Andras said, his tone sharper than he’d intended. “One quick cut across the neck. It couldn’t have hurt them for more than a second.”

Madame Morgenstern set her silverware down and put a napkin to her mouth as if she felt ill, and Elisabet’s expression became slyly triumphant. Mrs. Apfel stood in the doorway holding a water pitcher, waiting to see what would happen next.

“Go on,” Elisabet said. “What did he do then, after he made the cut?”

“I think we’re finished with this subject,” Andras said.

“No, please. I’d like to hear the rest, now that you’ve started.”

“Elisabet, that’s enough,” Madame Morgenstern said.

“But the conversation’s just getting interesting.”

“I said it’s enough.”

Elisabet crumpled her napkin and threw it onto the table. “I’m finished,” she said. “You can sit here with your guest and eat meat. I’m going to the cinema with Marthe.” She pushed her chair back and stood, nearly upsetting Mrs. Apfel and the water pitcher, then went off down the hall and knocked around in a distant room. A few moments later her heavy footsteps echoed on the stairs. The door of the dance studio slammed and its mullioned window jingled.

At the dining table, Madame Morgenstern lowered her forehead onto her palm. “I apologize, Monsieur Lévi,” she said.

“No, please,” he said. “It’s fine.” In fact, he wasn’t at all sorry to have been left alone with Madame Morgenstern. “Don’t be upset on my account,” he said. “That was a terrible topic of conversation. I apologize.”

“There’s no need,” Madame Morgenstern said. “Elisabet is impossible at times, that’s all. I can’t do anything with her once she’s decided she’s angry at me.”

“Why should she be angry at you?”

She gave a half smile and shrugged. “It’s complicated, I’m afraid. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl. I’m her mother. She doesn’t like me to have anything to do with her social affairs. And I mustn’t remind her that we’re Hungarian, either. She considers Hungarians an unenlightened people.”

“I’ve felt that way, too, at times,” Andras said. “I’ve spent a lot of time lately struggling to be French.”

“Your French is excellent, as it turns out.”

“No, it’s terrible. And I’m afraid I did nothing to dispel your daughter’s notion that Magyars are barbarians.”

Madame Morgenstern hid a smile behind her hand. “You were rather quick with that business about the butcher,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Andras said, but he’d started to laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about that over lunch.”

“So you really did know the butcher in your town,” she said.

“I did. And I saw him at his work. But Elisabet was right, I’m afraid-it was awful!”

“You must have grown up-where? Somewhere in the countryside?”

“Konyár,” he said. “Near Debrecen.”

“Konyár? That’s not twenty kilometers from Kaba, where my mother was born.” A shade passed over her features and was gone.

“Your mother,” he said. “But she doesn’t live there anymore?”

“No,” Madame Morgenstern said. “She lives in Budapest.” She fell silent for a moment, then turned the conversation back to Andras’s history. “So you’re a Hajdú, too. A flatlands boy.”

“That’s right,” he said. “My father owns a lumberyard in Konyár.” So she wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t discuss the subject of her family. He had been on the verge of mentioning the letter-of saying I’ve met your mother-but the moment had passed now, and there was a kind of relief in the prospect of talking about Konyár. Ever since he’d arrived in Paris and had mastered enough French to answer questions about his origins, he’d been telling people he was from Budapest. What would anyone have known of Konyár? And to those who would have known, like József Hász or Pierre Vago, Konyár meant a small and backward place, a town you were lucky to have escaped. Even the name sounded ridiculous-the punchline of a bawdy joke, the sound of a jumping jack springing from a box. But he really was from Konyár, from that dirt-floored house beside the railroad tracks.

“My father’s something of a celebrity in town, to tell the truth,” Andras said.

“Indeed! What is he known for?”

“His terrible luck,” Andras said. And then, feeling suddenly brave: “Shall I tell you his story, the way they tell it at home?”

“By all means,” she said, and folded her hands in anticipation.

So he told her the story just as he’d always heard it: Before his father had owned the lumberyard, he had suffered a string of misfortunes that had earned him the nickname of Lucky Béla. His own father had fallen ill while Béla was at rabbinical school in Prague, and had died as soon as he returned home. The vineyard he inherited had succumbed to blight. His first wife had died in childbirth, along with the baby, a girl; not long after, his house had burned to the ground. All three of his brothers were killed in the Great War, and his mother had given in to grief and drowned herself in the Tisza. At thirty he was a ruined man, penniless, his family dead. For a time he lived on the charity of the Jews of Konyár, sleeping in the Orthodox shul at night and eating what they left for him. Then, at the end of a drought summer, a famous Ukrainian miracle rabbi arrived from across the border and set up temporary quarters in the shul. He studied Torah with the local men, settled disputes, officiated at weddings, granted divorces, prayed for rain, danced in the courtyard with his disciples. One morning at dawn he came upon Andras’s father sleeping in the sanctuary. He’d heard the story of this unfortunate, this man whom all the village said must be suffering from a curse; they seemed to regard him with a kind of gratitude, as if he’d drawn the attention of the evil eye away from the rest of them. The rabbi roused Béla with a benediction, and Béla looked up in speechless fear. The rabbi was a gaunt man with an ice-white beard; his eyebrows stood out from the curve of his forehead like lifted wings, his eyes dark and liquid beneath them.

“Listen to me, Béla Lévi,” the rabbi whispered in the half-light of the sanctuary. “There’s nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best. You must fast for two days and go to the ritual bath, then accept the first offer of work you receive.”

Even if Lucky Béla had been a believer in miracles, his misfortunes would have made him a skeptic. “I’m too hungry to fast,” he said.

“Practice at hunger makes the fast easier,” the rabbi said.

“How do you know there’s not a curse on me?”

“I try not to wonder how I know. Certain things I just know.” And the rabbi made another blessing over Béla and left him alone in the sanctuary.

What more did Lucky Béla have to lose? He fasted for two days and bathed in the river at night. The next morning he wandered toward the railroad tracks, faint with hunger, and picked an apple from a stunted tree beside a white brick cottage. The proprietor of the lumberyard, an Orthodox Jew, stepped out of the cottage and asked Béla what he thought he was doing.

“I used to have a vineyard,” Béla said. “When I had a vineyard, I would have let you pick my grapes. When I had a house I would have welcomed you to my house. My wife would have given you something to eat. Now I have neither grapes nor house. I have no wife. I have no food. But I can work.”