Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

He pulled his tallis closer and tried to still his thoughts; there was some relief in repeating the prayers, some comfort in Polaner’s presence and the presence of these other men and women who knew the words by heart. He said the prayer that listed the sins committed by the House of Israel, and the one in which he asked the Lord to keep his mouth from evil and his lips from speaking guile. He said the prayer of gratitude for the Torah, and listened to others sing the words written in the white-clad scrolls. And at the end of the service he prayed to be written into the Book of Life, as if there might still be a place in such a book for him.

After the service, he and Polaner walked across the river to the students’ dining club, which had emptied over the summer, filled again as the schools prepared to reopen, and then emptied again with the threat of war. The server loaded Andras’s plate with bread and beef and hard oily potatoes.

“At home, my mother would be serving brisket and chicken noodle soup,” Polaner said as they took their plates to a table. “She would never let potatoes like these enter her kitchen.”

“You can’t blame the potato,” Andras said. “It’s hardly the potato’s fault.”

“It always begins with the potato,” Polaner said, raising an eyebrow darkly.

Andras had to laugh. It seemed a miracle that Polaner could be sitting across the table from him after what had happened last January. Though much was wrong with the world, it could not be denied that Eli Polaner had recovered from his injuries and had been brave enough to return to the École Spéciale for a second year.

“Your mother must have hated to let you leave Kraków,” Andras said.

Polaner unfolded his napkin and arranged it on his lap. “She’s never glad to see me go,” he said. “She’s my mother.”

Andras looked at him carefully. “You never told your parents what happened, did you?”

“Did you think I would?”

“You nearly died, after all.”

“They’d never have let me come back,” Polaner said. “They’d have shipped me off to some Freudian sanatorium for a talking cure, and you’d be lonely tonight, copain.”

“Lucky for me, then, that you didn’t tell,” Andras said. He had missed his friends, and Polaner in particular. He had imagined that by now they would all be dining at this club again, that soon they would be together in the studio, that they’d be meeting after classes at the Blue Dove to drink black tea and eat almond biscuits. He’d imagined himself narrating their exploits to Klara, making her laugh as they sat by the fire on the rue de Sévigné. But Rosen and Ben Yakov were home with their families, and he and Polaner were here alone together, and the École Spéciale had suspended the beginning of classes, as had all the other colleges of Paris. And he wasn’t narrating anything to Klara at all.

As the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur began to unfold, he told himself he would likely hear from her soon. War seemed inevitable. At night there were practice blackouts; the few corner lamps that remained lit were covered with black paper hoods to cast their light downward. Departing families clotted the trains and raised a cacophony of car horns in the streets. Five hundred thousand more men were called to the colors. Those who stayed in Paris rushed to buy gas masks and canned food and flour. A telegram arrived from Andras’s parents: IF WAR DECLARED COME HOME FIRST AVAIL TRAIN. He sat on his bed with the telegram in his hands, wondering if this were the end of everything: his studies, his life in Paris, all of it. It was the twenty-eighth of September, three days before Hitler’s threatened occupation of the Sudetenland. In seventy-two hours his life might fall apart. It was impossible to wait any longer. He would go to the rue de Sévigné at once and demand to see Klara; he would insist that she let him escort her and Elisabet out of the city as soon as they could pack their bags. Before he could lose his nerve, he threw on a jacket and ran all the way to her house.

But when he reached the door, he found his way barricaded by Mrs. Apfel. Madame Morgenstern would see no one, she said. Not even him. And she had no plans to leave the city, as far as Mrs. Apfel knew. At the moment she was in bed with a headache and had asked particularly that she not be disturbed. In any case, hadn’t Andras heard? There was to be a meeting at Munich the next day, a final effort to negotiate peace. Mrs. Apfel was certain those idiots would come to their senses. He would see, she said; there wouldn’t be a war after all.

Andras hadn’t heard. He ran to Forestier’s and spent the next two days with his ear sewn to the wireless. And on the thirtieth of September it was announced that Hitler had reached an accord with France, Britain, and Italy: Germany would have the Sudetenland in ten days’ time. There would, after all, be a military occupation. The Sudeten Czechs would be required to leave their homes and shops and farms without taking a stick of furniture, a single bolt of cloth or ear of corn, and there was to be no program of compensation for the lost goods. In the regions occupied by Polish and Hungarian minorities, popular votes would determine new frontiers; Poland and Hungary would almost certainly reclaim those lost territories. The radio announcer read the agreement in quick grainy French, and Andras struggled to make sense of it. How was it possible that Britain and France had accepted a plan almost identical to the one they’d rejected out of hand a few days earlier? The radio station broadcast the noise of celebration from London; Andras could hear the local jubilation well enough just outside Forestier’s studio, where hundreds of Parisians cheered the peace, celebrating Daladier, praising Chamberlain. The men who had been called up could now come home. That was an unarguable good-so many written into the Book of Life for another year. Why, then, did he feel more as Forestier seemed to feel-Forestier, who sat in the corner with his elbows on his knees, his forehead hammocked in his hands? The recent series of events seemed clothed in disgrace. Andras felt the way he might have if, after the attack on Polaner, Professor Perret had preserved peace at the École Spéciale by expelling the victim.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, Andras and Polaner went to hear Kol Nidre at the Synagogue de la Victoire. With solemn ceremony, with forehead-scraping genuflections, the cantor and the rabbi prayed for rachmones upon the congregation and the House of Israel. They declared that the congregants were released from the vows they’d made that year, to God and to each other. They thanked the Almighty that Europe had avoided war. Andras gave his thanks with a lingering sense of dread, and as the service progressed, his unhappiness flowed into another channel. That week, the threat of war had once again proved an effective distraction from the situation with Klara. For a time he had fooled himself, had let himself believe that her month of silence might contain a tacit promise, a suggestion that she was still wrestling with the problem that had sent them home early from Nice. But he couldn’t deceive himself any longer. She didn’t want to see him. They were finished; that was clear. Her silence could not be read otherwise.

That night he went home and put her things into a wooden crate: her comb and brush, two chemises, a stray earring in the shape of a daffodil, a green glass pillbox, a book of Hungarian short stories, a book of sixteenth-century French verse from which she liked to read aloud to him. He lingered for a moment over the book; he’d bought it for her because it contained the Marot poem about the fire that dwelt secretly in snow. He turned to the poem now. Carefully, with his pocketknife, he cut the page from the book and put it into the envelope that contained her letters. Those he kept, because he couldn’t bear to part with them. He wrote her a note on a postcard he’d bought as a keepsake months earlier: a photograph of the Square Barye, the tiny park at the eastern tip of the Île Saint-Louis, where he’d spoken the Marot poem into her ear on New Year’s Day. Dear Klara, he wrote, here are a few things you left with me. My feelings for you are unchanged, but I cannot continue to wait without knowing the reason for your silence, or whether it will be broken. So I must make the break myself. I release you from your promises to me. You need not be faithful to me any longer, nor conduct yourself as if you might someday be my wife. I have released you, but I cannot release myself from what I vowed to you; you must do that, Klara, if that is what you want. In the meantime, should you choose to come to me again, you will find that I am still, as ever, your ANDRAS.