Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“There’s no work for you here,” the man said, gently, “but come inside and eat.”

The man’s name was Zindel Kohn. His wife, Gitta, set bread and cheese before Lucky Béla. With Zindel and Gitta and their five small children, Lucky Béla ate; as he did, he allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past. He could not have imagined that this house would become his own house, that his own children would eat bread and cheese at this very table. But by the end of the afternoon he had a job: The boy who worked the mechanical saw at Zindel Kohn’s lumberyard had decided to become a disciple of the Ukrainian rabbi. He had left that morning without notice.

Six years later, when Zindel Kohn and his family moved to Debrecen, Lucky Béla took over the lumberyard. He married a black-haired girl named Flóra who bore him three sons, and by the time the oldest was ten, Béla had earned enough money to buy the lumberyard outright. He did a fine business; people in Konyár needed building materials and firewood in every season. Before long, hardly anyone in Konyár remembered that Lucky Béla’s nickname had been given in irony. The history might have been allowed to fade altogether had it not been for the return of the Ukrainian rabbi; this was at the height of the worldwide depression, just before the High Holidays. The rabbi spent an evening at Lucky Béla’s house and asked if he might tell his story in synagogue. It might help the Jews of Konyár, he said, to be reminded of what God would do for his children if they refused to capitulate to despair. Lucky Béla consented. The rabbi told the story, and the Jews of Konyár listened. Though Béla insisted his good fortune was due entirely to the generosity of others, people began to regard him as a kind of holy figure. They touched his house for good luck when they passed, and asked him to be godfather to their children. Everyone believed he had a connection to the divine.

“You must have thought so yourself as a child,” Madame Morgenstern said.

“I did! I thought he was invincible-even more so than most children think of their parents,” Andras said. “Sometimes I wish I’d never lost the illusion.”

“Ah, yes,” she said. “I understand.”

“My parents are getting older,” Andras said. “I hate to think of them alone in Konyár. My father had pneumonia last year, and couldn’t work for a month afterward.” He hadn’t spoken about this to anyone in Paris. “My younger brother’s at school a few hours away, but he’s caught up in his own life. And now my older brother’s leaving, going off to medical school in Italy.”

A shadow came to Madame Morgenstern’s features again, as if she’d experienced an inward twist of pain. “My mother’s getting older, too,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, a very long time.” She fell silent and glanced away from the table at the tall west-facing windows. The late autumn light fell in a diagonal plane across her face, illuminating the tapered curve of her mouth. “Forgive me,” she said, trying to smile; he offered his handkerchief, and she pressed it to her eyes.

He found himself fighting the impulse to touch her, to trace a line from her nape down the curve of her back. “Perhaps I’ve stayed too long,” he said.

“No, please,” she said. “You haven’t even had dessert.”

As if she’d been listening just beyond the dining-room door, Mrs. Apfel came in at that moment to serve the walnut strudel. Andras found that he had an appetite again. He was ravenous, in fact. He ate three slices of strudel and drank coffee with cream. As he did, he told Madame Morgenstern about his studies, about Professor Vago, about the trip to Boulogne-Billancourt. He found her easier to talk to than Madame Gérard. She had a way of pausing in quiet thought before she responded; she would pull her lips in pensively, and when she spoke, her voice was low and encouraging. After lunch they went back to the parlor and looked through her album of picture postcards. Her dancer friends had traveled as far as Chicago and Cairo. There was even a hand-colored postcard from Africa: three animals that looked like deer, but were slighter and more graceful, with straight upcurved horns and almond-shaped eyes. The French word for them was gazelle.

“Gazelle,” Andras said. “I’ll try to remember.”

“Yes, try,” she said, and smiled. “Next time I’ll test you.”

When the afternoon light had begun to wane, she rose and led Andras to the hallway, where his coat and hat hung on a polished stand. She gave him his things and returned his handkerchief. As she led him down the stairs she pointed out the photographs on the wall, images of students from years past: girls in ethereal clouds of tulle or sylphlike draperies of silk, young dancers under the transient spell of costumes and makeup and stage lights. Their expressions were serious, their arms as pale and nude as the branches of winter trees. He wanted to stay and look. He wondered if any of the photographs were of Madame Morgenstern herself when she was a child.

“Thank you for everything,” he said when they’d reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Please.” She put a slim hand on his arm. “I should thank you. You were very kind to stay.”

Andras flushed so deeply at the pressure of her hand that he could feel the blood beating in his temples. She opened the door and he stepped out into the chill of the afternoon. He found he couldn’t look at her to say goodbye. Next time I’ll test you. But she’d returned his handkerchief as though their paths were unlikely to cross again. He spoke his goodbye to the doorstep, to her feet in their fawn-colored shoes. Then he turned away and she closed the door behind him. Without thinking, he retraced his steps toward the river until he had reached the Pont Marie. There he paused at the edge of the bridge and brought out the handkerchief. It was still damp where she’d used it to dry her eyes. As if in a dream, he put a corner of it into his mouth and tasted the salt she’d left there.

THAT NIGHT HE found it impossible to sleep. He couldn’t stop reviewing every detail of his afternoon at the Morgensterns’. The shameful bouquet, and how doubly shameful it had looked when she’d carried it into the parlor in the blue glass vase. The moment when he’d realized that she must be the elder Mrs. Hász’s daughter, and how it had flustered him to discover it-how he’d said The pleasure to make your acquaintance and Thank you for the invitation of me. How she’d held her back straight as though she were always dancing, until the moment at the table after Elisabet had gone-the way her back had curved then, showing the linked pearls of her spine, and how he’d wanted to touch her. The way she’d listened as he’d told his father’s story. The close heat of her shoulder as she sat beside him on the sofa in the parlor, paging through the album of picture postcards. The moment at the door when she’d rested her hand on his arm. He tried to re-create an image of her in his mind-the dark sweep of hair across her brow, the gray eyes that seemed too large for her face, the clean line of her jaw, the mouth that drew in upon itself as she considered what he’d said-but he couldn’t make the disparate elements add up to an image of her. He saw her again as she turned to smile at him over her shoulder, girlish and wise at the same time. But what was he thinking, what could he be thinking? What an absurdity for him to think this way about a woman like Claire Morgenstern-he, Andras, a twenty-two-year-old student who lived in an unheated room and drank tea from a jam jar because he couldn’t afford coffee or a coffee cup. And yet she hadn’t sent him away, she’d kept talking to him, he’d made her laugh, she’d accepted his handkerchief, she’d touched his arm in a confiding and intimate manner.