Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“I see. So you’ve put an end to things between Elisabet and Paul.”

“I hope so,” Klara said. “And I’ve punished her for showing you those letters.” Her brow folded into a familiar set of creases. “She seemed rather pleased with herself when she saw how upset I was about that. She told me I had gotten what I deserved. I’ve placed her under a kind of house arrest. Mrs. Apfel is keeping watch while I’m gone. Elisabet is not to go out until she writes you a letter of apology.”

“She’ll never do it. She’ll grow old and die first.”

“That will be her decision,” Klara said.

But he knew Elisabet wouldn’t remain bound by Klara’s house arrest for long, Mrs. Apfel notwithstanding. She’d soon find a way to escape, and he worried that when she did she’d leave no forwarding address. He didn’t want to be responsible for that.

“Let me come tomorrow and speak to her,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s any point.”

“Let me try.”

“She won’t see you. She’s been in a vicious mood.”

“It can’t have been as bad as my own.”

“You know what she’s like, Andras. She can be beastly.”

“I know. But she’s still just a girl, after all.”

Klara gave a deep sigh. “And what now?” she said, looking up at him from her chair. “What do we do, after all this?”

He ran a hand over the back of his neck. The question had been in his mind. “I don’t know, Klara. I don’t know. I’m going to sit down here on the bed. You can sit beside me if you like.” He waited until she sat beside him, and then he continued. “I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you the other night,” he said. “I acted as though you’d been unfaithful to me, but you haven’t, have you?”

“No,” she said, and put a hand on his knee, where it burned like a feverish bird. “What I feel for you would make that impossible. Or absurd, at the very least.”

“How is that, Klara? What is it you feel for me?”

“It may take me some time to answer that question,” she said, and smiled.

“I can’t be what he was. I can’t give you a place to live, or be anything like a father to Elisabet.”

“I have a place to live,” she said. “And Elisabet, though she’s still a child in many ways, will soon be grown. I don’t need now what I needed then.”

“What do you need now?”

She drew in her mouth in her pensive way. “I’m not certain, exactly. But I can’t seem to stand to be away from you. Even when I’m livid with anger at you.”

“There’s still a great deal I don’t know about you.” He stroked the curve of her back; he could feel the glowing coals of her vertebrae through her thin jersey.

“I hope there’ll be time to learn.”

He drew her down with him onto the bed, and she put her head on his shoulder. He ran his hand along the warm dark length of her hair and took its upturned ends between his fingers. “Let me talk to Elisabet,” he said. “If we’re to continue with this, I can’t have her hate me. And I can’t hate her.”

“All right,” Klara said. “You’re welcome to try.” She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the slope of the ceiling, with its water stains in the shape of fish and elephants. “I was terrible to my mother, too,” she said. “It’s foolish to pretend I wasn’t.”

“We’re all terrible to our parents at sixteen.”

“Not you, I’m sure,” she said, her eyelids closing. “You love your parents. You’re a good son.”

“I’m here in Paris while they’re in Konyár.”

“That’s not your fault. Your parents worked so you could go to school, and they wanted you to come here. You write to them every week. They know you love them.”

He hoped she was right. It had been nine months since he’d seen them. Still, he could feel a fine cord stretched between them, a thin luminous fiber that ran from his chest all the way across the continent and forked into theirs. Never before had he lived through a fever without his mother; when he’d been sick in Debrecen she’d taken the train to be with him. Never had he finished a year at school without knowing that soon he’d be home with his father, working beside him in the lumberyard and walking through the fields with him in the evening. Now there was another filament, one that linked him to Klara. And Paris was her home, this place thousands of kilometers from his own. He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the time when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father’s orchard.

For the first time ever, he went to see József Hász at school. The Beaux-Arts was a vast urban palace, a monument to art for art’s sake; it made the humble courtyard and studios of the École Spéciale look like something a few boys had thrown together in an empty lot. He entered through a floriated wrought-iron gate between two stern figures carved in stone, and crossed a sculpture garden packed with perfect marble specimens of kore and kouros, straight from his art history textbook, staring into the distance with empty almond-shaped eyes. He climbed the marble entry stairs of a three-story Romanesque building and found himself in a hallway teeming with young men and women, all of them dressed with careful offhandedness. A list of studio assignments bore József’s name; a map told him where to look. He went upstairs to a classroom with a sloping north-facing ceiling made all of glass. There, among rows of students intent on their paintings, József was applying varnish to a canvas that at first glance seemed to depict three smashed bees lying close to the black abyss of a drain. Upon closer inspection, the bees turned out to be black-haired women in black-striped yellow dresses.

József didn’t seem much surprised to see Andras at his painting studio. He raised a cool eyebrow and continued varnishing. “What are you doing here, Lévi?” he asked. “Don’t you have projects of your own to finish? Are you slacking off for the day? Did you come to make me have a drink in the middle of the morning?”

“I’m looking for that American,” Andras said. “That person who was at your party. Paul.”

“Why? Are you dueling with him over his statuesque girlfriend?” He kicked the easel of the student across from him, and the student gave a shout of protest.

“You imbecile, Hász,” said Paul, for that was who it was. He stepped out from behind the canvas with a paintbrush full of burnt umber, his long equine features tightened with annoyance. “You made me give my maenad a moustache.”

“I’m sure it’ll only improve her.”

“Lévi again,” Paul said, nodding at Andras. “You go to school here?”

“No. I came to talk to you.”

“I think he wants to fight you for that strapping girl,” József said.

“Hász, you’re hilarious,” Paul said. “You should take that act on tour.”

József blew him a kiss and went back to his varnishing.

Paul took Andras’s arm and led him to the studio door. “Sometimes I can stand that jackass and sometimes I can’t,” he said as they descended the stairs. “Today I can’t, particularly.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you at studio,” Andras said. “I didn’t know where else to find you.”

“I hope you’ve come to tell me what’s going on,” Paul said. “I haven’t seen Elisabet for days. I assume her mother’s keeping her at home after that late night we had. But maybe you’ve got more information.” He gave Andras a sideways glance. “I understand you’ve got something going with Madame Morgenstern.”

“Yes,” Andras said. “I suppose you could say we’ve got something going.” They had reached the front doors of the building and sat down outside on the marble steps. Paul searched his pocket for a cigarette and lit it with a monogrammed lighter.