Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“It’s all much the same as when you left,” Tibor said. “Though everyone’s increasingly worried that Hitler’s going to drag Europe into another war.”

“If he does, the Jews will get the blame. Here in France, at least.”

The waiter returned, and Tibor took a long, thoughtful drink of Basque beer. “Not as much fraternité or égalité as you once thought, is there?”

Andras told him about the meeting of Le Grand Occident, and then about what had happened to Polaner. Tibor took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with his handkerchief, and put them on again.

“I was talking to a man on the train who’d just been in Munich,” he said. “A Hungarian journalist sent to report on a rally there. He saw three men beaten to death for destroying copies of a state-sponsored anti-Jewish newspaper. Insurgents, the German press called them. One of them was a decorated officer from the Great War.”

Andras sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “With Polaner the situation’s personal,” he said. “There are questions about his relationship with one of the men who did it.”

“It’s just the same brand of hatred writ small,” Tibor said. “Horrible any way you look at it.”

“I was a fool to think things would be different here.”

“ Europe ’s changing,” Tibor said. “The picture’s getting bleaker everywhere. But it hasn’t all been grim for you here, I hope.”

“It hasn’t.” He looked up at Tibor and managed a smile.

“What’s that about, Andráska?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you harboring secrets? Have you got some intrigue going on?”

“You’ll have to buy me a stronger drink,” Andras said.

At a nearby bar they ordered whiskey, and he told Tibor everything: about the invitation to the Morgensterns’, and how he’d recognized the name and address from the letter; how he’d fallen in love with Klara, not Elisabet; how they’d failed to keep the attraction at bay. How Klara had told him nothing about what had brought her to Paris, or why her identity had to be kept a secret. When he’d finished, Tibor held on to his glass and stared.

“How much older is she?”

There was no way around it. “Nine years.”

“Good God,” Tibor said. “You’re in love with a grown woman. This is serious, Andras, do you understand?”

“Serious as death.”

“Put down that glass. I’m talking to you.”

“I’m listening.”

“She’s thirty-one,” Tibor said. “She’s not a girl. What are your intentions?”

A tightness gathered in Andras’s throat. “I want to marry her,” he said.

“Of course. And you’ll live on what?”

“Believe me, I’ve thought about that.”

“Four and a half more years,” Tibor said. “That’s how long it’ll take you to get your degree. She’ll be thirty-six. When you’re her age, she’ll be nearly forty. And when you’re forty, she’ll be-”

“Stop it,” Andras said. “I can do the math.”

“But have you?”

“So what? So what if she’s forty-nine when I’m forty?”

“What happens when you’re forty and a thirty-year-old woman starts paying attention to you? Do you think you’ll stay faithful to your wife?”

“Tibi, do you have to do this?”

“What about the daughter? Does she know what’s going on between you and her mother?”

Andras shook his head. “Elisabet detests me, and she’s terrible to Klara. I doubt she’d take kindly to the situation.”

“And József Hász? Does he know you’ve fallen in love with his aunt?”

“No. He doesn’t know his aunt’s whereabouts. The family doesn’t trust him with the information, whatever that means.”

Tibor laced his fingers. “Good God, Andras, I don’t envy you.”

“I was hoping you’d tell me what to do.”

“I know what I’d do. I’d break it off as soon as I could.”

“You haven’t even met her.”

“What difference would that make?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you might want to. Aren’t you even curious?”

“Desperately,” he said. “But I won’t participate in your undoing. Not even as a spectator.” And he called the waiter over and requested the bill, then firmly changed the subject.

In the morning Andras brought Tibor to the École Spéciale, where they met Vago at his office. When they entered, Vago was sitting behind his desk and talking on the telephone in his particular manner: He held the mouthpiece between his cheek and shoulder and gesticulated with both hands. He sketched the shape of a flawed building in the air, then erased it with a sweep of his arm, then sketched another building, this one with a roof that seemed flat but was not flat, to allow for drainage-and then the conversation was over, and Andras introduced Tibor to Vago at last, there in the room where he had been the subject of so many morning conversations, as though the talking itself had caused Tibor to materialize.

“Off to Modena,” Vago said. “I envy you. You’ll love Italy. You won’t ever want to go back to Budapest.”

“I’m grateful for your help,” Tibor said. “If I can ever repay the favor…”

Vago waved the idea away. “You’ll become a doctor,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I won’t need your favors.” Then he gave them the news from the hospital: Polaner was holding steady; the doctors had decided not to operate yet. Of Lemarque there was still no sign. Rosen had kicked down the door of his rooming house the day before, but he was nowhere to be found.

Tibor sat through the morning classes with Andras. He heard Andras present his solution to the statics problem about the cathedral buttress, and he let Andras show him his drawings in studio. He met Ben Yakov and Rosen, who quickly exhausted the few words of Hungarian they’d learned from Andras; Tibor bantered with them in his sparse but fearless French. At noon, over lunch at the school café, Rosen talked about his trip to Lemarque’s rooming house. He looked depleted now; his face had lost its angry flush, and his russet-colored freckles seemed to float on the surface of his skin. “What a rathole,” he said. “A hundred cramped dark rooms full of smelly men. It stank worse than a prison. You could almost feel sorry for the bastard, living in a place like that.” He paused to give a broad yawn. He’d been up all night at the hospital.

“And nothing?” Ben Yakov said. “Not a trace of him?”

Rosen shook his head. “I searched the place from basement to attic. Nobody had seen him, or at least they claimed they hadn’t.”

“And what if you’d found him?” Tibor asked.

“What would I have done, you mean? At the time, I would have choked him to death with my bare hands. But I would have been a fool to do it. We need to know who his accomplices were.”

The student café began to clear. Doors opened and slammed all around the atrium as students filtered into the classrooms. Tibor watched them go, his eyes grave behind his silver-rimmed glasses.

“What are you thinking about?” Andras asked him in Hungarian.

“Lucky Béla,” Tibor said. “Ember embernek farkasa.”

“Speak French, Hungarians,” Rosen said. “What are you talking about?”

“Something our father used to say,” Andras said, and repeated the phrase.

“And what does that mean, in the parlance of the rest of the world?”

“Man is a wolf to man.”

That night they were supposed to go to a party at József Hász’s on the boulevard Saint-Jacques. It was to be the first time Andras would spend an evening at József’s since the beginning of his liaison with Klara. The idea made him anxious, but József had invited him in person a week earlier; a few of his paintings were to appear in a student show at the Beaux-Arts, which Andras must be sure to miss because it would be a terrible bore, but after the opening there would be drinks and dinner at József’s. Andras had demurred on the basis that Tibor would be in town and that he couldn’t burden József with another guest, but that had only made József insist all the more: If Tibor were in Paris for the first time, he couldn’t miss a party at József Hász’s.