Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

He nailed the top onto the crate and hefted it. It weighed almost nothing, those last vestiges of Klara in his life. In the dark he went to her house one last time and set the box on the doorstep, where she would find it in the morning.

The next day he prayed and fasted. During the early service he felt certain he had made a terrible mistake. If he’d waited another week, he thought, she might have come back to him; now he had secured his own unhappiness. He wanted to run from the synagogue to the rue de Sévigné and retrieve the box before anyone found it. But as the fast scoured him from the inside, he began to believe that he’d done the right thing, that he’d done what he had to do to save himself. He pulled his tallis around his shoulders and leaned into the repetition of the eighteen benedictions. The familiar progression of the prayer brought him greater certainty. Nature had its cycles; there was a time for all things, and all things passed away.

By the evening service he was scraped out and numb and dizzy from fasting. He knew he was sliding toward some abyss, and that he was powerless to stop himself. At last the service concluded with the piercing spiral of the shofar blast. He and Polaner were supposed to go to dinner on the rue Saint-Jacques; József had invited them to break the fast with his friends from the Beaux-Arts. They walked across the river in silence, sunk into the last stages of their hunger. At József’s there was music and a vast table of liquor and food. József wished them a happy new year and put glasses of wine into their hands. Then, with a confidential crook of his finger, he drew Andras aside and bent his head toward him.

“I heard the most remarkable thing about you,” he said. “My friend Paul told me you’re involved with the mother of that tall girl, his obstreperous Elisabet.”

Andras shook his head. “Not anymore,” he said. And he took a bottle of whiskey from the table and locked himself in József’s bedroom, where he got blind drunk, shouted curses at himself in the mirror, terrified pedestrians by leaning out over the balcony edge, vomited into the fireplace, and finally passed into unconsciousness on the floor.

JUDAISM OFFERED no shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn, no injunction against shaving or listening to music or going to work. He couldn’t live in his torn clothes, couldn’t spend his days sitting in ashes. Nor could he turn to more secular modes of comfort; he couldn’t afford to drink himself into oblivion every night or suffer a nervous collapse. After he had scraped himself off József’s parquet floor and crawled back to his own apartment, he concluded that he had reached the nadir of his grief. The thought itself was medicinal. If this was the lowest point, then things would have to improve. He had made the break with Klara. Now he had to go on without her. Classes would soon begin again at the École Spéciale; he couldn’t fail his second year of school on her account. Nor could he justify hanging himself or leaping from a bridge or otherwise indulging in Greek tragedy. He had to go about the business of his life. He thought these things as he stood at the window of his garret, looking down into the rue des Écoles, still nursing a wild and irrepressible hope that she’d come around the corner in her red hat, half running to see him, the skirt of her fall coat flying behind her.

But when her silence stretched into a seventh week, even his most fantastical hopes began to dull. Life, oblivious to his grief, continued. Rosen and Ben Yakov returned to Paris with the rest of the students of the École Spéciale, Rosen in a state of chronic rage over what had happened and was still happening in Czechoslovakia, Ben Yakov pale with love for a girl he’d met in Italy that summer, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi in Florence. He had vowed to bring the girl to Paris as his bride; he’d taken a job reshelving books at the Bibliothèque Nationale to save money for that purpose. Rosen had a new passion, too: He had joined the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme, and was consumed with rallies and meetings. Andras himself had less time than ever to consider his situation with Klara. With the help of Vago’s recommendation, he had been offered the architecture internship for which he’d applied in the spring. He’d had to cut back his hours at Forestier’s, but there was a small stipend to make up for the loss of income. Now, three afternoons a week, he found himself at the elbow of an architect named Georges Lemain, playing the junior intern’s role of plan-filer, pencil-line-eraser, black-coffee-fetcher, calculation-maker. Lemain was a ruler-narrow man with a sleek head of clipped gray hair. He spoke rapid metallic French and drew with machinelike precision. Often he infuriated his colleagues by singing operatic airs as he worked. As a result he’d been sequestered in a far corner of the office, walled off by bookshelves filled with back issues of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. As Andras worked at his own lowly desk beside Lemain’s great drawing table, he learned the airs and could soon sing them on his own. In return for his tolerance and diligence, Lemain began to help Andras with his school assignments. His fleet-looking angles of glass and polished planes of stone began to find their way into Andras’s designs. He encouraged Andras to keep a portfolio of private sketches, work that had nothing to do with his École Spéciale projects; he urged Andras to show him ideas that he’d been developing. And so, one afternoon in late October, Andras ventured to bring in the plans for the summer house in Nice. Lemain spread the plans on his own worktable and bent over the elevations.

“A wall like this won’t last five years in Nice,” he said, framing a segment of Andras’s drawing with his thumbs. “Consider the salt. These crevices will give it a foothold.” He laid a piece of tracing paper over Andras’s drawing and sketched in a smooth wall. “But you’ve found a clever way to use the grade of the hill. The oblique orientation of the patio and terrace works well with the topography.” He placed another sheet of tracing paper over the rear elevation and joined two levels of the terrace into a single curving slope. “Not too much terrace, though. Keep the shape of the hill intact. You can plant rosemary to hold the soil in place.”

Andras watched, making further changes in his mind. In the hard light of the office, the plans seemed less like a blueprint for a life he desired and more like the blank shape of a client’s house. That room need not be called a ballet studio; it was simply a light-filled salon. And those two small bedrooms on the main level might not be children’s rooms; they could be chambres 2 and 3, to be filled according to the client’s whims. The kitchen did not have to contain the imagined remnants of an abandoned meal; the chambre principal didn’t have to accommodate two Hungarian émigrés, or anyone in particular. All afternoon he erased and redrew until he believed he had chased the ghosts from the design.

With the rolled-up plans and Lemain’s sheets of tracing paper under his arm, he made his way toward the rue des Écoles through a confetti of dry leaves. The sound of their scrape and crunch against the sidewalk made him think of a thousand autumn afternoons in Konyár and Debrecen and Budapest, the burnt smell of nuts roasting in the street vendor’s cast-iron kettle, the stiff gray wool of school uniforms, the flower-sellers’ jars suddenly full of wheat sheaves and velvet-faced sunflowers. He paused at the window of a photographer’s studio on the rue des Écoles, where a new series of portraits had just been displayed: somber Parisian children in peasant clothing posed against a painted harvest backdrop. The children all wore shoes, and the shoes were brilliant with polish. He had to laugh aloud, imagining Tibor and Mátyás and himself arrayed in front of a real hay wagon in the clothes they’d worn when they were children: not these impeccable smocks and trousers, but brown workshirts sewn by their mother, hand-me-down dungarees, rope belts, caps made from the cloth of their father’s disintegrated overcoats. On their feet they would have worn the fine brown dust of Konyár. Their pockets would have been packed with small hard apples, their arms sore from baling hay for the neighboring farmers. From the house would come the rich red smell of chicken paprikás; their father would have sold so much wood for new hay wagons and sheds that they would eat chicken every Friday until winter. It was a good time, that stretch of warm days in October after the hay came in. The air was still soft and fragrant, the pond that would soon be frozen still a bright liquid oval reflecting mill and sky.