Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“He knows the basic facts. He’s the only one in France who does. Madame Nevitskaya died some time ago.”

“You told him so he’d understand why you couldn’t love him.”

“We were very close, Zoltán and I. I wanted him to know.”

“Not even Elisabet knows,” Andras said, smoothing the rim of his cup with his thumb. “She believes she’s the child of someone you loved.”

“Yes,” Klara said. “It couldn’t have helped her to know the truth.”

“And now you’ve told me. You’ve told me so I’d understand what happened at Nice. You fell in love once, with Sándor Goldstein, and you can’t love anyone else. Madame Gérard guessed as much-she told me a long time ago that you were in love with a man who’d died.”

Klara gave a quiet sigh. “I did love Sándor,” she said. “I adored him. But it’s romantic nonsense to suggest that what I felt for him would keep me from falling in love again.”

“What happened at Nice, then?” Andras said. “What made you turn away?”

She shook her head and put her cheek into her hand. “I was frightened, I suppose. I saw what it might be like to have a life with you. For the first time that seemed possible. But there were all the terrible things I hadn’t told you. You didn’t know I had shot and killed a man, or that I was a fugitive from justice. You didn’t know I’d been raped. You didn’t know how damaged I was.”

“How could it have done anything but make me feel closer to you?”

She came to stand beside him at the window, her face flushed and damp, raw-looking in the dim light. “You’re a young man,” she said. “You can love someone whose life is simple. You don’t need any of this. I was certain you’d see the situation that way as soon as I told you. I was certain I’d seem a ruin of a person.”

Last December she’d stood in just the same place with a cup of tea shivering in her hands. You have some too, she’d said, offering the cup. Te.

“Klara,” he said. “You’re mistaken. I wouldn’t trade your complication for anyone else’s simplicity. Do you understand?”

She raised her eyes to him. “It’s difficult to believe.”

“Try,” he said, and drew her close so he could breathe the warm scent of her scalp, the darkness of her hair. Here in his arms was the girl who had lived in the house near the Városliget, the young dancer who had loved Sándor Goldstein, the woman who loved him now. He could almost see inside her that unnameable thing that had remained the same through all of it: her I, her very life. It seemed so small, a mustard seed with one rootlet shot deep into the earth, strong and fragile at once. But it was all there needed to be. It was everything. She had given it to him, and now he held it in his hands.

They spent that night together on the rue des Écoles. In the morning they washed and dressed in the blue chill of Andras’s room, and then walked together to the rue de Sévigné. It was the seventh of November, a cold gray morning feathered with frost. Andras went inside with her to light the coal stove in the studio. He hadn’t entered that place, her own place, for two months. It was quiet in the expectant way of classrooms; it smelled of ballet shoes and rosin, like the Budapest studio she’d described. In a corner stood the drawing table she had given him for his birthday, draped to keep out the dust. She went to it and pulled the sheet free.

“I’ve kept it, just as you asked,” she said.

Andras took the sheet from her and wrapped it around them both. He drew her so close he could feel her hipbones hard against his own, her ribcage pressing against his ribcage as they breathed. He draped the end of the sheet over their heads so they stood shrouded together in a corner of the studio. In the white privacy of that tent he lifted her chin with one finger and kissed her. She drew the sheet tighter around them.

“Let’s never come out,” he said. “Let’s stay here always.”

He bent to kiss her again, full of the certainty that nothing could make him move from that place-not hunger, nor exhaustion, nor pain, nor fear, nor war.

THE NEWS CAME to Andras at studio. Though he was half blind with exhaustion after his night with Klara, he had to go to school; he had a critique that day. It was an emulation project: he’d had to design a single-use space in the style of a contemporary architect. He had designed an architecture studio after Pierre Charreau, modeling it upon the doctor’s house on the rue Saint-Guillaume: a three-level building composed of glass block and steel, flooded with diffuse light all day and glowing from inside at night. Everyone had arrived early to pin their designs to the walls; once Andras had found a place for his drawings, he took a stool from his worktable and sat with the older students around a paint-spattered radio. They were listening to the news, expecting nothing but the usual panchromium of worries.

It was Rosen who caught it first; he turned up the volume so everyone could hear. The German ambassador had just been shot. No, not the ambassador, an embassy official. A secretary of legation, whatever that was. Ernst Eduard vom Rath. Twenty-nine years old. He’d been shot by a child. A child? That couldn’t be right. A youngster. A boy of seventeen. A Jewish boy. A German-Jewish boy of Polish extraction. He had shot the official to avenge the deportation of twelve thousand Jews from Germany.

“Oh, God,” Ben Yakov said, pulling his hands through his pomaded hair. “He’s a dead man.”

Everyone crowded closer. Had the embassy official been killed, or was he still alive? The answer came a moment later: He had been shot four times in the abdomen; he was undergoing surgery at the Alma Clinic on rue de l’Université, not ten minutes from the École Spéciale. It was rumored that Hitler was sending his personal physician from Berlin, along with the director of the Surgical Clinic of the University of Munich. The assailant, Gruenspan or Grinspun, was being held at an undisclosed location.

“Sending his personal physician!” Rosen said. “I’m sure he is. Sending him with a nice big capsule of arsenic for their man.”

“What do you mean?” someone demanded.

“Vom Rath has to die for Germany,” Rosen said. “Once he does, they can do whatever they want to the Jews.”

“They’d never kill their own man.”

“Of course they would.”

“They won’t have to,” another student said. “The man’s been shot four times.”

Polaner had stepped away from the crowd near the radio and had gone to smoke a cigarette by the window. Andras went over and looked down into the courtyard, where two fifth-year students were hanging a complicated wooden mobile from a tree. Polaner cracked the window open and blew a line of smoke out into the chilly air.

“I knew him,” he said. “Not the Jewish boy. The other.”

“Vom Rath?” Andras said. “How?”

Polaner glanced up at Andras and then looked away. He tapped his ash onto the windowsill outside, where it circled for a moment and then scattered. “There’s a certain bar I used to go to,” Polaner said. “He used to go, too.”

Andras nodded in silence.

“Shot,” Polaner said. “By a seventeen-year-old Jewish kid. Vom Rath, of all people.”

Vago came in at that moment and turned off the radio, and everyone began to take their seats for the brief lecture he’d give before the critique. Andras sat on his wooden stool only half listening, scratching a box into the surface of the studio desk with the metal clip of his pencil. It was all too much, what Klara had told him the night before and what had happened at the German Embassy. In his mind they became one: Klara and the Polish-German teenager, both violated, both holding guns in trembling hands, both firing, both condemned. Nazi doctors hastened toward Paris to save or kill a man. And the Polish-German boy was in jail somewhere, waiting to learn if he was a murderer or not. Andras’s drawing had slipped one of its pins and hung askew from the wall. He looked at it and thought, That’s right. At that moment, everything seemed to hang at an angle by a single pin: not just houses, but whole cities, countries, peoples. He wished he could quiet the din in his mind. He wanted to be in the smooth white bed at Klara’s house, in her white bedroom, in the sheets that smelled like her body. But there was Vago now, taking Andras’s drawing by its corner and repinning it to the wall. There was the class gathering around. It was time for his critique. He made himself get up from the table and stand beside his drawing while they discussed it. It was only afterward, when everyone was patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand, that he realized it had been a success.