Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“I told myself it was natural to feel a certain tenderness for her,” he went on. “She’d been entrusted to my care, and she was entirely without defenses, and she was out in the world for the first time. Everything was new to her. Or not entirely new, because she’d read about it all in books-it was all coming true for her, a world she’d imagined but had never seen. I watched it happen. I was the one she turned to when we crossed the Italian border. It was like watching a person being born. The pain of it, too. I saw her understand she’d left her parents, her family, behind. When she cried after the crossing, I put my arms around her. I did it almost without thinking.” He paused and took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “And she looked up at me, Andras, and by now you’ve guessed it. I kissed her. Not an innocent kiss, I’m afraid. Not a brief one. So you see, I did transgress against your friend. And I transgressed against Ilana. And not just then.” He paused again. “I want to tell you this, because it’s been weighing on me since it happened. I said something to her, here in this station, just before we got off the train.”

“What did you say?”

“I reminded her she still had a choice,” Tibor said. “I told her I’d be happy to take her back to Italy if she changed her mind.” He shook his head and put on his glasses again. “And I confessed myself to her, Andras. Later. I did it the morning we went to see her at Klara’s. When we went to give her that library book.”

Andras remembered the whispered conversation, Tibor’s trembling hands, Ilana’s dismay. “Oh, Tibor,” he said. “So that’s what was happening when I came in from the kitchen.”

“That’s right,” Tibor said. “And for a moment I thought I saw her hesitate. I deluded myself that she might feel something for me, too.” He shook his head. “If I’d gone to see her again, I might have ruined your friend’s happiness.”

“But you didn’t,” Andras said. “Everything went as planned. And they both seemed perfectly happy at the wedding.” He believed it as he said it, but a moment later he found himself wondering whether it had been true. Hadn’t Ilana seemed distressed that morning with Tibor? Hadn’t there been some strange exchange of energy between them in the kitchen on her wedding day? Was she sitting in Ben Yakov’s apartment and thinking of Tibor at that very moment?

“They’re married,” Tibor said. “It’s done. Now my feelings for her are their own punishment.”

Andras understood. He put an arm around his brother’s shoulders and looked at the insect form of the locomotive.

“I’ve been terribly lonely in Modena,” Tibor said. “It must have been the same for you, coming here. But you met Klara.”

“Yes,” he said. “And that was terrible, too, at times.”

“I see how it is between you now,” Tibor said. “So many times this week I was sick with envy.” He pressed his hands between his knees. At the window of the locomotive an argument was taking place between the engineer and an official-looking conductor, as though they were debating whether to make the trip to Italy after all.

“Don’t go back,” Andras said. “Come live with me, if you want.”

Tibor shook his head. “I have to go to school. I want to finish my studies. And in any case, I don’t know if I could stand to be so close to her.”

Andras turned to his brother. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s true.”

There was an almost imperceptible shift in Tibor’s features, a softening of the lines around his mouth. “She is,” he said. “I can see her in that gown and veil. God, Andras, do you think she’ll be happy?”

“I hope so.”

Tibor nudged the corner of his leather satchel with the toe of his polished shoe. “I think you’d better write to Anya and Apa,” he said. “Let them know what’s happened between you and Klara. Tell them as much as you can about her situation. I’ll write them too. I’ll tell them I’ve gotten to know her, and that I don’t consider you mad for wanting to marry her.”

“I am mad, though.”

“No more so than any man in love,” Tibor said.

The conductor blew the boarding whistle. Tibor got to his feet and drew Andras close in a quick embrace. “Be a good man, little brother,” he said.

“Bon voyage,” Andras said. “Have a good spring. Study hard. Cure the sick.”

Tibor crossed the platform and boarded the train, his bag slung over his shoulder. Moments after he’d climbed aboard, the train gave a vast metallic groan; with a series of grunts and screeches it began to roll from the station. The grasshopper legs of the engine bent and flexed. Andras hoped Tibor had found a window seat, where he would have the comfort of watching the city fade into the darkness of the wintry fields. He hoped Tibor would be able to sleep. He hoped he’d get home swiftly, and that once he was there he would forget there had ever been a girl called Ilana di Sabato.

That year’s Spectacle d’Hiver was a quiet and humble affair. The Théâtre Deux Anges was small and shabby and ill-heated, its blue velvet seats faded to gray; the dark upper tiers seemed full of ghosts. Girls chased each other across the stage in costumes of blue and white satin, and a silver snow drifted down from some cold cloud in the flyspace. A group of twelve-year-olds in icy pink tulle put Andras in mind of dawn on New Year’s Day. He thought of Klara at the Square Barye: the flush of her forehead beneath her red wool hat, the crystalline dew on her eyebrows, the fog of her breath in the cold air. He could scarcely believe she would be waiting for him backstage after the recital-the same woman who had kissed him in that frozen park nearly a year ago. It seemed a miracle that any man who loved a woman might be loved by her in return. He rubbed his hands together in the chill and waited for the violet lights to fade.

EVERY SPRING the students of the École Spéciale competed for the Prix du Amphithéâtre, which brought its winner a gold medal worth a hundred francs, the admiration of the other students, and a measure of prestige for the winner’s curriculum vitae. Last year’s prize had gone to the beautiful Lucia for her design of a reinforced-concrete apartment building. This year’s subject was an urban gymnasium for Olympic sports: swimming, diving, gymnastics, weightlifting, running, fencing. It seemed to Andras a ridiculous notion to design a gymnasium while Europe edged toward war. Refugees poured into France from fractured Spain; the Marais had become a swamp of asylum-seekers. Hundreds of thousands more had been detained at the border and sent to internment camps in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Every day brought bad news, and the worst always seemed to come from Czechoslovakia. Hitler had told the Czech foreign minister that the nation must take a more aggressive approach to its Jewish problem; a week later the Czech government threw Jewish men and women out of their university professorships and civil-service jobs and public-health positions. In Hungary, Horthy followed suit by calling for a new cabinet that would support a stronger alliance with the Axis powers. It wouldn’t be long, newspaper columnists speculated, before the Hungarian parliament passed new anti-Jewish laws, too.

In the face of such news, how was Andras supposed to design a swimming pool, a locker room, a yard for fencing practice? Late one night he sat in the studio with an open letter on the table before him, his drawing tools still in their box. The letter had come earlier that day from his brother Mátyás:

12 February 1939

Budapest

Andráska,

Anya and Apa have just told me your great news. Mazel tov! I must meet the lucky girl as soon as possible. Since it seems you’ll be in France for the foreseeable future, I will have to join you there. I’m saving money already. By now you’ve heard from our parents that I have left school. I am living in Budapest and working as a window trimmer. It’s a good trade. I make 20 pengő a week. My best client is the haberdasher on Molnár utca. I heard from a friend that their old window trimmer had quit, so I went there the next day and offered my services. They told me to trim the window as a trial. I made a hunting display: two riding suits, one cloak, four neckties, a hunting blanket, a hat, a horn. I finished in an hour, and in another hour they had sold everything in the window. Even the horn.