Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

To make matters worse, it turned out that the man Klara had shot had been a war hero. He had saved fifteen members of his company in the battle of Kovel, had received an official commendation from the Emperor. And if that were not enough to turn any judge’s favor against Klara, it emerged-or the police claimed-that the right-wing members of their department had recently received threatening messages from Gesher Zahav, a Zionist organization to which Klara and Sándor had been linked. Three times in the past month the dancers had been seen coming and going from the organization’s headquarters on Dohány utca; never mind that what they’d been doing was attending Sunday night dances, not plotting the murder of police operatives. The fact that Klara had disappeared was considered to be a confirmation of her guilt, of her position as an instrument of Gesher Zahav’s plot. News of it was all over town; every paper in Budapest had run a front-page article about the young Jewish dancer who had murdered a war hero. And that was the end of Klara’s parents’ hopes to bring her home. It was a lucky thing, her father’s lawyer wrote, that they’d managed to get her out of the country when they had. If she’d stayed, there would have been another bloodbath.

For the first two months of her time at Madame Nevitskaya’s, Klara lay in a tiny dark room that looked out onto an airshaft. Every piece of bad news from Budapest seemed to push her farther toward the bottom of a well. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t stand to have anyone touch her. Sándor was dead. She would never see her parents or her brother again. Would never go home to Budapest. Would never again live in a place where everyone she passed on the street spoke Hungarian. Would never skate in the Városliget or dance on the stage of the Operaház, would never see any of her friends from school or eat a cone of chestnut paste as she walked the Danube strand on Margaret Island. Would never see any of the pretty things in her room, her leather-bound diaries and Herend vases and embroidered pillows, her Russian nesting dolls, her little menagerie of glass animals. She had even lost her name, would never again be Klara Hász; she would forever be Claire Morgenstern, a name chosen for her by a lawyer. Every morning she woke to face the knowledge that it had all really happened, that she was a fugitive here at Madame Nevitskaya’s in France. It seemed to have made her physically ill. She spent the first hours of each day hunched over a basin, vomiting and dry-heaving. Every time she stood she thought she would faint. One morning Madame Nevitskaya came into Klara’s room and asked a series of mysterious-seeming questions. Did her breasts hurt? Did the smell of food make her sick? When was the last time she had bled? Later that day a doctor came and performed a painful and humiliating examination, after which he confirmed what Madame Nevitskaya had suspected: Klara was pregnant.

For three days all she could do was stare at the dart of sky she could see from her bed. Clouds passed across it; a vee of brown birds flew through it; in the evening it darkened to indigo and then filled with the gold-shot black of Paris night. She watched it as Nevitskaya’s maid, Masha, fed her chicken broth and bathed her forehead. She watched it as Nevitskaya explained that there was no need for Klara to endure the torture of carrying that man’s child. The doctor could perform a simple operation after which Klara would no longer be pregnant. After Nevitskaya left her alone to contemplate her fate, she stared and stared at that changeable dart of sky, scarcely able to comprehend what she had learned. Pregnant. A simple operation. But Madame Nevitskaya didn’t know the whole story; she and Sándor had been lovers for six months before he’d been killed. They had made love the very night of the attack. They had taken precautions, but she knew those precautions didn’t always work. If she was pregnant, it was just as likely that the child was his.

The thought was enough to get her out of bed. She told Madame Nevitskaya that she wouldn’t have an operation, and why. Madame Nevitskaya, a stern, glossy-haired woman of fifty, took Klara in her arms and began to weep; she understood, she said, and would not try to dissuade her. Klara’s parents, informed of her pregnancy and her plans, felt otherwise. They couldn’t abide the idea that she might find herself raising that other person’s child. In fact, her father was so strongly opposed to the idea that he threatened to cut Klara off altogether if she kept the child. What would she do, alone in Paris? She couldn’t dance, not when she was pregnant, and not with an infant to care for; how would she support herself? Wasn’t her situation difficult enough already?

But Klara had made up her mind. She would not have that operation, nor would she give up the baby after she’d carried it. Once it had occurred to her that the child might be Sándor’s, the idea began to take on the weight of a certainty. Let her father cut her off. She would work; she knew what she could do. She went to Madame Nevitskaya and begged to be allowed to teach a few classes of beginning students. She could do it until her pregnancy showed, and she could do it once she’d recovered from the birth. If Nevitskaya would have her as an instructor, it would save her life and the child’s.

Nevitskaya would. She gave Klara a class of seven-year-olds and bought her the black practice dress worn by all the teachers at the school. And soon Klara began to live again. Her appetite came back and she gained weight. Her dizziness disappeared. She found she could sleep at night. Sándor’s child, she thought; not that other’s. She went to a barber shop and got her hair cut short. She bought a sack dress of the kind that was fashionable then, a dress she could wear until late in the pregnancy. She bought a new leather-bound diary. Every day she went to the ballet school and taught her class of twenty little girls. When she couldn’t teach anymore, she begged Masha to let her help with the work around the house. Masha showed her how to clean, how to cook, how to wash; she taught her to navigate the market and the shops. When, in her sixth month, Klara noticed the vendors glancing at her belly and at her bare left hand, she bought a brass band she wore on her third finger like a wedding ring. She bought it as a convenience, but after a time it came to seem as though it really were a wedding ring; she began to feel as if she were married to Sándor Goldstein.

As her ninth month approached, she began to have vivid dreams about Sándor. Not the nightmares she’d had in her first weeks in Paris-Sándor lying in the alley, his eyes open to the sky-but dreams in which they were doing ordinary things together, working on a difficult lift or arguing over the answer to some arithmetic problem or wrestling in the cloakroom of the Operaház. In one dream he was thirteen, stealing sweets with her at the market. In another he was younger still, a thin-armed boy teaching her to dive at Palatinus Strand. She thought of him when the first contractions came on; she thought of him when the water rushed out of her. It was Sándor she cried for when the pain grew long and deep inside her, a white-hot stream of fire threatening to cleave her. When she woke after the cesarean she put out her arms to receive his child.

But it wasn’t his child at all, of course. It was Elisabet.

When she’d finished her story they sat silent by the fire, Andras on the footstool and Klara in the vermilion chair, her feet tucked under her skirt. The tea had grown cold in their cups. Outside, a hard wind had begun to rattle the trees. Andras got up and went to the window, looked down at the entrance of the Collège de France, at its ragged lace collar of clochards.

“Zoltán Novak knows about this,” Andras said.