Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

They celebrated New Year’s Eve at the Bastille, with thousands of other cheering Parisians. Afterward they drank a bottle of champagne in the sitting room and ate a feast of cold paté and bread and cheese and cornichons. Neither of them wanted to sleep, knowing that the next day would be the last of that string of impossible days. When dawn broke, instead of going to bed they put on coats and hats and went walking by the river. The sun cast its gold light onto the buttresses of Notre-Dame; the streets were full of cabs taking drowsy revelers home to their apartments. They sat on a bench in the dead garden at the eastern tip of Île St.-Louis and kissed each other’s freezing hands, and Andras dredged from his mind a Marot poem he’d learned with Professor Vago:

D’Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige

Anne (par jeu) me jecta de la Neige

Que je cuidoys froide certainement;

Mais estoit feu, l’experience en ay-je;

Car embrasé je fuz soubdainement.

Puis que le feu loge secretement

Dedans la Neige, où trouveray je place

Pour n’ardre point? Anne, ta seule grace

Estaindre peult le feu que je sens bien,

Non point par Eau, par Neige, ne par Glace,

Mais par sentir un feu pareil au mien.

And when she protested against sixteenth-century French after a night of sleeplessness and drinking, he whispered another version into her ear, a spontaneous Hungarian translation of that hot exchange between the poet Marot and his girlfriend: as a game Anne threw snow at him, and it was cold, of course. But what he felt was heat, because he found himself in her arms. If fire dwelt secretly in snow, how could he escape burning? Only Anne’s mercy could control the flame. Not with water, snow, nor ice, but with a fire like his own.

When he woke that afternoon, Klara lay fast asleep beside him, her hair tangled on the pillows. He got up, pulled on his trousers, washed his face. His head throbbed. He cleaned up the remnants of the previous night’s sitting-room picnic, made coffee in the kitchen, drank a slow black cup and rubbed his temples. He wanted Klara to be awake, to be with him, but he didn’t want to wake her. So he refilled his cup and roamed the apartment by himself. He walked through the empty dining room, where they’d had their first lunch together; he walked through the sitting room, where he’d seen her for the first time. He took a long look at the bathroom with its miraculous hot-water heater, where they’d spent long hours bathing. Finally, in the hall, he paused before Elisabet’s bedroom. Their travels through the rooms had never taken them there, but now he pushed the door open. Elisabet’s room was surprisingly neat; her dresses hung in a limp row in the open wardrobe. Two pairs of brown shoes were ranged underneath: a caramel-colored pair on the left, a chestnut-colored pair on the right. On the dresser there was a wooden music box with tulips painted on the lid. A silver comb stood upright between the bristles of a silver brush. An empty perfume flask glowed yellow-green. He opened the top dresser drawer: grayish cotton underwear and grayish cotton brassieres. A few handkerchiefs. Some frayed hair ribbons. A broken slide rule. A tube of epoxy rolled tight all the way to its tip. Six cigarettes bound with a strip of paper.

He closed the drawer and sat down in the little wooden chair beside the bed. He looked at the yellow coverlet, at the rag doll keeping watch over the silent room, and considered how furious Elisabet would be if she knew what had happened in her absence. Though there was some small hint of triumph in the feeling, there was also a sense of fear; if she found out, he knew she wouldn’t stand for it. He couldn’t know what effect her anger might have upon her mother, but at the very least he knew that Klara’s ties to Elisabet were far stronger than her tenuous ties to him. The scar on her belly reminded him of it every time they made love.

He turned and left the little room, and went to Klara where she lay sleeping on the tumbled bed. She had curled herself around the pillow he’d been using. She was naked, her legs tangled in the eiderdown. In the silvery northern light of the winter afternoon, he could see the hairline creases at the corners of her eyes, the faint signs of her age. He loved her, wanted her, felt himself stirring again at the sight of her. He knew he would be willing to give his life to protect her. He wanted to take her to Budapest and heal whatever terrible hurt had occurred there, see her walk into the drawing room of that house on Benczúr utca and put her hands into her mother’s hands. His eyes burned at the thought that he was only twenty-two, a student, unable to do anything of substance for her. The lives they’d been leading those past ten days hadn’t been their real lives. They hadn’t worked, hadn’t taken care of anyone but themselves, hadn’t had much need for money. But money was an ever-present woe for him. It would be years before he’d have a steady income. If his studies went as planned, it would be another four and a half years before he became an architect. And he’d lived long enough already, and had faced enough difficulty, to know that things seldom went as planned.

He touched her shoulder. She opened her gray eyes and looked at him. “What is it?” she said. She sat up and held the eiderdown against herself. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing’s happened,” he said, sitting down beside her. “I’ve just been thinking about what’s to happen after.”

“Oh, Andras,” she said, and smiled drowsily. “Not that. That’s my least favorite subject at the moment.”

This was the way it had gone, anytime either of them had introduced the topic over the past week or so; they had turned it aside, allowed it to drift away as they drifted into another series of pleasures. It was easy enough to do; their real lives had come to seem far less real than the one they were leading together on the rue de Sévigné. But now their time was nearly finished. They couldn’t avoid the subject any longer.

“We have six more hours,” he said. “Then our lives begin again.”

She slipped her arms around him. “I know.”

“I want to have everything with you,” he said. “A real life. God help me! I want you beside me at night, every night. I want to have a child with you.” He had not yet said these things aloud; he could feel the blood rushing to his skin as he spoke.

Klara was silent for a long moment. She dropped her arms, sat back against the pillows, put her hand in his. “I have a child already,” she said.

“Elisabet’s not a child.” But those vulnerable shoes at the bottom of the closet. The painted box on the dresser. The hidden cigarettes.

“She’s my daughter,” Klara said. “She’s what I’ve lived for these sixteen years. I can’t just take up another life.”

“I know. But I can’t not see you, either.”

“Perhaps it would be best, though,” she said, and looked away from him. Her voice had fallen almost to a whisper. “Perhaps it would be best to stop with what we’ve had. Our lives may spoil it.”

But what would his life be without her, now that he knew what it was to be with her? He wanted to weep, or to take her by the shoulders and shake her. “Is that what you’ve thought all along?” he said. “That this was a lark? That when our lives began again it would be over?”

“I didn’t think about what would happen,” she said. “I didn’t want to. But we’ve got to think about it now.”

He got out of bed and took his shirt and trousers from a chair. He couldn’t look at her. “What good will that do?” he said. “You’ve already decided it’s impossible.”

“Please, Andras,” she said. “Don’t go.”

“Why should I stay?”

“Don’t be angry at me. Don’t leave like that.”