Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

The little girl fished a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles from her satchel.

“Please, Madame,” he said. “If you can, be sure she wears them.”

“I’ll try,” Madame Morgenstern said, and smiled.

“They fall off when I dance,” the girl protested.

“Say goodbye, Sophie,” the doctor said. “We’ll be late for dinner.”

In the doorway, Sophie turned and waved. Then she and her father were gone, and Andras stood alone in the studio with Madame Morgenstern. She stepped away from the stove to gather a few things the children had left behind: a stray glove, a hairpin, a red scarf. She put all the things into a basket which she set beside the piano. Objets trouvés.

“I wanted to thank you again,” Andras said, when the silence between them had stretched to an intolerable length. It came out more gruffly than he’d intended, and in Hungarian, a low rural growl. He cleared his throat and repeated it in French.

“Please, Andras,” she said in Hungarian, laughing. “You wrote such a lovely note. And there was no need to thank me in the first place. I’m certain it wasn’t the most pleasant afternoon for you.”

He couldn’t tell her what the afternoon had been like for him, or what the past week had been like. He saw again in his mind the way she’d smiled and tugged at her sweater when she’d recognized him, that involuntary and self-conscious act. He crushed his cap in his hands, looking at the polished studio floor. There were heavy footsteps on the floor above, Elisabet’s, or Mrs. Apfel’s.

“Have we put you off for good?” Madame Morgenstern asked. “Can you come again tomorrow? Elisabet will have a friend here for lunch, and maybe we’ll go skating in the Bois de Vincennes afterward.”

“I don’t have skates,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“Neither do we,” she said. “We always rent them. It’s lovely. You’ll enjoy it.”

It’s lovely, you’ll enjoy it, as if it were really going to happen. And then he said yes, and it was.

THIS TIME, when he went to lunch on the rue de Sévigné, he didn’t wear a costume tie and he didn’t bring a bushel of wilting flowers; instead he wore an old favorite shirt and brought a bottle of wine and a pear tart from the bakery next door. As before, Mrs. Apfel laid out a feast: a layered egg-and-potato rakott krumpli, a tureen of carrot soup, a hash of red cabbage and apples with caraway, a dark peasant loaf, and three kinds of cheese. Madame Morgenstern was in a quiet mood; she seemed grateful for the presence of Elisabet’s friend, a stout heavy-browed girl in a brown woolen dress. This was the Marthe with whom Elisabet had gone to the movies the week before. She kept Elisabet talking about goings-on at school: who had made a fool of herself in geography class and who had won a choir solo and who was going to Switzerland to ski during the winter holidays. Every now and then Elisabet threw a glance at Andras, as if she wanted him to take note of the fact that the conversation excluded him. Outside, a light snow had begun to fall. Andras couldn’t wait to get out of the house. It was a relief when the pear tart was cut and eaten, when they could put their coats on and go.

At half past two they rode the Métro to the Bois. When they emerged from the station, Elisabet and Marthe hurried ahead, arm in arm, while Madame Morgenstern walked with Andras. She spoke about her students, about the upcoming winter pageant, about the recent cold snap. She was wearing a close-fitting red woolen hat shaped like a bell; the loose ends of her hair curled from its edge, and snowflakes gathered on its crown.

Inside the snowy Bois, between the barren elms and oaks and frosted evergreens, the paths were full of men and women carrying skates. From the lake came the shouts and calls of skaters, the scrape of blades on ice. They came to a break in the trees, and before them lay the frozen lake with its small central islands, its fenced banks crowded with Parisians. On the ice, serious-looking men and women in winter coats moved in a slow sweep around the islands. A warming house with a scalloped glass entryway stood on a shallow rise. According to a sign lettered in red, skates could be rented there for three francs. Elisabet and Marthe led their little group into the warming house and they waited in line at the rental counter. Andras insisted on renting skates for all of them; he tried not to think about what those twelve vanished francs would mean to him in the coming week. On a damp green bench they exchanged their shoes for skates, and soon afterward they were staggering downhill on a rubber path toward the lake.

Andras stepped onto the ice and cut a chain of arcs toward the larger of the two islands, testing the edge and balance of the blades. Tibor had taught him to skate when he was five years old; they had skated every day on the millpond in Konyár, on blades their father had made from scrapwood edged with heavy-gauge wire. As schoolboys in Debrecen they had skated at an outdoor rink on Piac utca, a perfect manmade oval artificially cooled by underground pipes and groomed to a glassine smoothness. Andras was light and nimble on skates, faster than his brothers or his friends. Even now, on these dull rental blades, he felt agile and swift. He cut between the skaters in their dark woolen coats, his jacket fluttering behind him, his cap threatening to fly from his head. If he had paused to notice, he might have seen young men watching him with envy as he sped by; he might have seen the girls’ curious glances, the elderly skaters’ looks of disapproval. But he was aware only of the pure thrill of flying across the ice, the quick exchange of heat between his blades and the frozen lake. He made a circuit around the larger island, coming up behind the women at top speed, then slipped between Madame Morgenstern and Elisabet so neatly that they both stopped and gasped.

“Do you mind watching where you’re going?” Elisabet said in her curt French. “You could hurt someone.” She took Marthe’s arm and the two of them pushed past him. And Andras was left to skate with Madame Morgenstern through a drifting tulle of snow.

“You’re quick on your feet,” she said, and gave him a fleeting smile from beneath the bell of her hat.

“Maybe on the ice,” Andras said, blushing. “I was never very good at sports.”

“You look as if you knew something about dancing, though.”

“Only that I’m not very good at that, either.”

She laughed and skated ahead of him. In the gray afternoon light, the lake brought to mind the Japanese paintings Andras had seen at the International Exposition; the evergreens spread their dark feathers against a wash of sky, and the hills were like doves huddled together for warmth. Madame Morgenstern moved easily on the ice, her back held straight, her arms rounded, as though this were just another form of ballet. She never stumbled against Andras or leaned on him as they circled the lake; even when she hit a sprig of evergreen and lost her balance, she skipped onto the other blade without a glance at him. But as they cleared the far end of the smaller island a second time, she drifted to his side.

“My brother and I used to skate in Budapest,” she said. “We used to go to the Városliget, not far from our house. You know the beautiful lake there, by the Vajdahunyad Castle?”

“Oh, yes.” He’d never been able to afford the entry fee while he’d lived in Budapest, but he and Tibor had gone many times to watch the skaters at night. The castle, an amalgam of a thousand years of architectural styles, had been built for a millennial celebration forty years earlier. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements melted into one another along the length of the building; to walk along that strange façade was to pass through centuries. The castle was lit from below, and there was always music. Now he imagined two children, Madame Morgenstern and her brother-József Hász’s father?-casting their own dark shadows across the lighter shadow of the castle.