Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

In the rue des Rosiers a man and a woman stood beside one of these posters and kissed unabashedly, their hands buried inside each other’s coats. Andras was reminded of a game the children used to play in Konyár: Behind the baker’s shop there was a wall of white stone that was always warm because the baker’s oven was on the other side, and in the wintertime the boys would meet there after school to kiss the baker’s daughter. The baker’s daughter had pale brown freckles scattered across her nose like sesame seeds. For ten fillér she would press you up against the wall and kiss you until you couldn’t breathe. For five fillér you could watch her do it to someone else. She was saving for a pair of ice skates. Her name was Orsolya, but they never called her that; instead they called her Korcsolya, the word for ice skates. Andras had kissed her once, had felt her tongue explore his own as she held him up against the warm wall. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old; Orsolya must have been ten. Three of his friends from school were watching, cheering him on. Halfway through the kiss he’d opened his eyes. Orsolya, too, was open-eyed, but absent, her mind fixed elsewhere-perhaps on the ice skates. He’d never forgotten the day he came out of the house to see her skating on the pond, the silver flash at her soles like a teasing wink, a steely goodbye-forever to paid kissing. That winter she’d nearly died of cold, skating in all weather. “That girl will go through the ice,” Andras’s mother had predicted, watching Orsolya tracing loops in an early March rain. But she hadn’t gone through the ice. She’d survived her winter on the millpond, and the next winter she was there again, and the one after that she’d gone away to secondary school. He could see her now, a red-skirted figure through a gray haze, untouchable and alone.

Now he made his way though the grotto of medieval streets toward the rue de Sévigné, toward Madame Morgenstern’s building. He hadn’t decided to come here, but here he was; he stood on the sidewalk opposite and rocked on his heels. It was near midnight, and all the lights were out upstairs. But he crossed the street and looked over the demi-curtains into the darkened studio. There was the morning-glory horn of the phonograph, gleaming black and brutal in a corner; there was the piano with its flat toothy grimace. He shivered inside his coat and imagined the pink-clad forms of girls moving across the yellow plane of the studio floor. It was bitterly, blindingly cold. What was he doing out here on the street at midnight? There was only one explanation for his behavior: He’d gone mad. The pressure of his life here, of his single chance at making a man and an artist of himself, had proved too much for him. He put his head against the wall of the entryway, trying to slow his breathing; after a moment, he told himself, he would shake off this madness and find his way home. But then he raised his eyes and saw what he hadn’t known he’d been looking for: There in the entryway was a slim glass-fronted case of the kind used to post menus outside restaurants; instead of a menu, this one held a white rectangle of cardstock inscribed with the legend Horaire des Classes.

The schedule, the pattern of her life. There it was, printed in her own neat hand. Her mornings were devoted to private lessons, the early afternoons to beginning classes, the later afternoons to intermediate and advanced. Wednesdays and Fridays she took the mornings off. On Sundays, the afternoons. Now, at least, he knew when he might look through this window and see her. Tomorrow wasn’t soon enough, but it would have to be.

All the next day he tried to turn his thoughts away from her. He went to the studio, where everyone gathered on Saturdays to work; he built his model, joked with Rosen, heard about Ben Yakov’s continuing fascination with the beautiful Lucia, shared his peasant bread with Polaner. By noon he couldn’t wait any longer. He went down into the Métro at Raspail and rode to Châtelet. From there he ran all the way to the rue de Sévigné; by the time he arrived he was hot and panting in the winter chill. He looked over the demi-curtains of the studio. A crowd of little girls in dancing clothes were packing their ballet shoes into canvas satchels, holding their street shoes in their hands as they lined up at the door. The covered entrance to the studio was crowded with mothers and governesses, the mothers in furs, the governesses in woolen coats. A few little girls broke through the cluster of women and ran off toward a candy shop. He waited for the crowd at the door to clear, and then he saw her just inside the entryway: Madame Morgenstern, in a black practice skirt and a close-wrapped gray sweater, her hair gathered at the nape of her neck in a loose knot. When all the children but one had been collected, Madame Morgenstern emerged from the entryway holding the last girl’s hand. She stepped lightly on the sidewalk in her dancing shoes, as if she didn’t want to ruin their soles on the paving stones. Andras had a sudden urge to flee.

But the little girl had seen him. She dropped Madame Morgenstern’s hand and took a few running steps toward him, squinting as if she couldn’t quite make him out. When she was close enough to touch his sleeve, she stopped short and turned back. Her shoulders rose and fell beneath the blue wool of her coat.

“It’s not Papa after all,” she said.

Madame Morgenstern raised her eyes in apology to the man who wasn’t Papa. When she saw it was Andras, she smiled and tugged the edge of her wrapped sweater straight, a gesture so girlish and self-conscious that it brought a rush of heat to Andras’s chest. He crossed the few squares of pavement between them. He didn’t dare to press her hand in greeting, could hardly look into her eyes. Instead he stared at the sidewalk and buried his hands in his pockets, where he discovered a ten-centime coin left over from his purchase of bread that morning. “Look what I found,” he said, kneeling to give the coin to the little girl.

She took it and turned it over in her fingers. “You found this?” she said. “Maybe someone dropped it.”

“I found it in my pocket,” he said. “It’s for you. When you go to the shops with your mother, you can buy candy or a new hair ribbon.”

The girl sighed and tucked the coin into the side pocket of her satchel. “A hair ribbon,” she said. “I’m not allowed candy. It’s bad for the teeth.”

Madame Morgenstern put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and drew her toward the door. “We can wait by the stove inside,” she said. “It’s warmer there.” She turned back to catch Andras’s eye, meaning to include him in the invitation. He followed her inside, toward the compact iron stove that stood in a corner of the studio. A fire hissed behind its isinglass window, and the little girl knelt to look at the flames.

“This is a surprise,” Madame Morgenstern said, lifting her gray eyes to his own.

“I was out for a ramble,” Andras said, too quickly. “Studying the quartier.”

“Monsieur Lévi is a student of architecture,” Madame Morgenstern told the girl. “Someday he’ll design grand buildings.”

“My father’s a doctor,” the girl said absently, not looking at either of them.

Andras stood beside Madame Morgenstern and warmed his hands at the stove, his fingers inches from her own. He looked at her fingernails, the slim taper of her digits, the lines of the birdlike bones beneath the skin. She caught him looking, and he turned his face away. They warmed their hands in silence as they waited for the girl’s father, who materialized a few minutes later: a short mustachioed man with a monocle, carrying a doctor’s bag.

“Sophie, where are your glasses?” he asked, pulling his mouth into a frown.