Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Oh, but that would be terrible,” said Madame Novak. “Mother is giving a party to welcome us, and the invitations have already been sent.”

Madame Gérard laughed. “No one could ever accuse you of being a populist, Edith,” she said, and the conversation soon resumed its former pace.

At dinner, Andras found himself seated between Madame Novak and the elderly woman in the Mainbocher gown. Andras found Madame Novak’s jasmine perfume so overpowering that it seemed to lace the flavor of every dish set before him; he ate jasmine terrapin soup, jasmine sorbet, jasmine pheasant. Klara was seated beside Novak down the table to Andras’s right, where it was impossible for him to see her face. The talk at the table was at first of Madame Gérard: her career and her new apartment and her enduring beauty. Marcelle listened with poorly acted modesty, her mouth slipping into a self-satisfied smile. When she’d grown bored of basking in flattery she turned the conversation to Budapest, its charms and difficulties and how it had changed since the Hungarians among them had lived there in their youth. She kept beginning her sentences by saying, “When we were Monsieur Lévi’s age.” A Captain Something-von-Other seated across from Andras declared that Europe would be at war before long, and that Hungary must be involved, and that Budapest would undergo profound changes before the decade closed. Madame Novak voiced the hope that the park where she’d played as a child would not be altered, at least; that was where she intended for her own child to play.

“Isn’t that right?” she asked her husband across the table. “I’ll have János’s nurse take him there as soon as we get to town.”

“Where, my dear?”

“The park on Pozsonyi út, at the river’s edge.”

“Of course,” said Novak absently, turning again to Klara.

The dinner concluded with cheeses and port, and the guests retired to a buff-walled room that held velvet settees and a Victrola. Madame Gérard demanded that they have dancing. The settees were moved aside, a record placed upon the Victrola, and the guests began swaying to a new American song, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Monsieur Novak took Klara by the waist and led her to the center of the room. They danced awkwardly, Klara with her hands braced against Novak’s arms, Novak trying to lower his head onto her shoulder. Madame Novak, willfully oblivious, danced a jerky jazz step with Captain Something-von-Other, and Andras found himself partnered with the elderly woman in black. The way you wear your hat, she sang into Andras’s ear. The way you sip your tea. The memory of all that-no, they can’t take that away from me.

“It’s about lost love!” she said, when he protested that his English was terrible. She seemed to think she had to shout into his ear in order to be heard above the music and conversation. “The man is parted from the woman, but he’ll never forget her! She haunts his dreams! She’s changed his life!”

No one could get enough of the song. Madame Gérard declared it her new favorite. They played it four times before they tired of it. Andras danced with Madame Gérard, and with Edith Novak, and with the elderly woman again; but Zoltán Novak would not release Klara. In a short time he would leave Paris forever; nothing could prevent that-not a rail strike, nor the threat of war, nor the force of his own love. Klara tried to extricate herself from his arms, but each time she pulled away he protested so loudly she had to stay with him to avoid a scene. Finally, too drunk to stand, he stumbled back onto a settee and wiped his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Madame Gérard took the record from the turntable and announced that the birthday cake would now be served, and Klara motioned Andras into a hallway.

“Let’s go,” she whispered. “We should never have come. I should have known Marcelle would arrange some horrible drama.”

He was only too eager to leave. They retrieved their coats from a red bedroom and slipped out into the hall. But Novak must have missed Klara, and then heard the lift descending; or perhaps he had just decided he couldn’t bear the heat of the room any longer. When they emerged onto the sidewalk he was there on the balcony, calling out to Klara as she and Andras walked arm in arm down the street. Andras, far from feeling any triumph, was sick with empathy. It seemed just as likely that he himself might have been the one she was leaving behind forever, the one who’d been sent back to Hungary without her, and the feeling was so strong he had to sit down on a bench and put his head between his knees. It was a fresh shock to feel her close beside him, her gloved hand on his shoulder. They sat there on the bench in the cold for what seemed a long time, neither of them speaking a word.

ON A DAY of knifelike December wind, the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme staged a protest against the German foreign minister’s visit to Paris. Andras and Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov stood in a tight group of demonstrators outside the Élysée Palace, shouting slogans of protest against the French and German governments, waving signs-NO FRIENDSHIP WITH FASCISTS; VON RIBBENTROP GO HOME-and singing the Zionist songs they’d learned at earlier meetings of the Ligue, which Rosen had insisted they all join after the pogrom in Germany. That morning he had woken them at dawn to paint placards. There could be no excuse for passivity, he said as he dragged them from their beds, no excuse for lying around while Joachim von Ribbentrop prepared to sign a nonaggression treaty with France; Bonnet, the French foreign minister who had been so accommodating about Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, had arranged it all. At Rosen’s they drank a pot of Turkish coffee and made a dozen signs, Rosen stirring the paint with a ruler and insisting they all breathe the fumes of revolution. Andras knew Rosen’s performance was largely for the benefit of his new copine, a Zionist nursing student whom he’d met that summer. The girl, Shalhevet, had joined them that morning to make the signs. She was tall and fierce-eyed, with a heartbreaking lock of white in her black hair; her occasional winks at Andras and Polaner and Ben Yakov suggested she knew how absurd Rosen could be, but she watched him with an admiration that betrayed her deeper feelings.

Though Andras had complained at being dragged from bed, he was glad to be called upon to do something more substantial than read the newspaper and lament its contents. As he stood outside the Élysée Palace holding his sign aloft, he thought of the young Grynszpan in Fresnes prison-what he must have been feeling at that moment, and whether or not he knew France was welcoming the German foreign minister that day. At noon, von Ribbentrop’s black limousine pulled up to the gates of the palace and was quickly ushered through. While the police watched warily and guarded the barricades around the palace, the Friendship Declaration was signed. There was nothing the protesters could have done to stop it from happening, but they’d made their feelings known. After the foreign minister had departed again, the Ligue marched all the way to the river, shouting and singing. And at the quai des Tuileries Andras and his friends broke away to end their afternoon at the Blue Dove, where the talk was not of politics but of their other favorite subject. Ben Yakov, it seemed, faced a terrible problem: Despite all his efforts, he’d only managed to save two thirds of the money he needed to bring his Florentine bride back to Paris -to steal her away, as Rosen said. And time was of the essence; they couldn’t wait any longer. In another month she would be married to the old goat to whom her parents had promised her.