Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Here you are,” József said. “The most beautiful city on earth. That dome is the Panthéon, and over there is the Sorbonne. To the left is St.-Etienne-du-Mont, and if you lean this way you can see a sliver of Notre-Dame.”

Andras rested his hands on the railing and looked out over an expanse of unfamiliar gray buildings beneath a cold curtain of mist. Chimneys crowded the rooftops like strange alien birds, and the green haze of a park hovered beyond a battalion of zinc mansards. Far off to the west, blurred by distance, the Tour Eiffel melted upward into the sky. Between himself and that landmark lay thousands of unknown streets and shops and human beings, filling a distance so vast as to make the tower look wiry and fragile against the slate-gray clouds.

“Well?” József said.

“There’s a lot of it, isn’t there?”

“Enough to keep a man busy. In fact, I’ve got to be off again in a few minutes. I’ve got a lunch appointment with a certain Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia.” He winked and straightened his tie.

“Ah. You mean the girl in sequins from last night?”

“I’m afraid not,” József said, a slow smile coming to his face. “That’s another mademoiselle altogether.”

“Maybe you can spare one for me.”

“Not a chance, old boy,” József said. “I’m afraid I need them all to myself.” And he slipped through the balcony door and returned to the large front room, where he wrapped the orange silk scarf around his neck again and put on a loose jacket of smoke-colored wool. He caught up Andras’s satchel and Andras took the suitcase, and they brought everything down in the lift.

“I wish I could see you to that boardinghouse, but I’m late to meet my friend,” József said once they’d gotten everything out to the curb. “Here’s the cab fare, though. No, I insist! And come around for a drink sometime, won’t you? Let me know how you’re getting on.” He clapped Andras on the shoulder, shook his hand, and went off in the direction of the Panthéon, whistling.

Madame V, the proprietress of the boardinghouse, had a few useless words of Hungarian and plenty of unintelligible Yiddish, but no permanent place for Andras; she managed to communicate that he could spend the night on the couch in the upstairs hallway if he liked, but that he’d better go out at once to look for other lodgings. Still in a haze from the night at József’s, he ventured out into the Quartier Latin amid the artfully disheveled students with their canvas schoolbags, their portfolios, their bicycles, their stacks of political pamphlets and string-tied bakery boxes and market baskets and bouquets of flowers. Among them he felt overdressed and provincial, though his clothes were the same ones in which he had felt elegant and urban a week earlier in Budapest. On a cold bench in a dismal little plaza he combed his phrase book for the words for price, for student, for room, for how much. But it was one thing to understand that chambre à louer meant room for rent, and quite another to ring a doorbell and inquire in French about the chambre. He wandered from Saint-Michel to Saint-Germain, from the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine to the rue Clovis, re-cursing his inattentiveness in French class and making tiny notes in a tiny notebook about the locations of various chambres à louer. Before he could muster the courage to ring a single bell, he found himself utterly exhausted; sometime after dark he retreated to the boardinghouse in defeat.

That night, as he tried to find a comfortable position on the green sofa in the hallway, young men from all across Europe argued and fought and smoked and laughed and drank until long past midnight. None of the men spoke Hungarian, and none seemed to notice that there was a new man in their midst. Under different circumstances Andras might have gotten up to join them, but now he was so tired he could scarcely turn over beneath the blanket. The sofa, a spindly, ill-padded thing with wooden arms, seemed to have been designed as an instrument of torture. Once the men had gone to bed at last, rats emerged from the wainscoting to conduct their predawn scavengery; they ran the length of the hallway and stole the bread Andras had saved from dinner. The smells of decaying shoes and unwashed men and cooking grease followed him into his dreams. When he woke, sore and exhausted, he decided that one night had been enough. He would go out into the quartier that morning and inquire at the first place that advertised a room for rent.

On the rue des Écoles, near a tiny paved square with a spreading chestnut tree, he found a building with that now-familiar sign in the window: chambre à louer. He knocked on the red-painted door and crossed his arms, trying to ignore the rush of anxiety in his chest. The door swung open to reveal a short, square, heavy-browed woman, her mouth bent sideways into a scowl; on the bridge of her nose rested a pair of thick black-rimmed spectacles that made her eyes look tiny and faraway, as though they belonged to another, smaller person. Her wiry gray hair was flattened on one side, as if she had just been sleeping in a wing chair with her head on the wing. She put a fist on her hip and stared at Andras. Summoning all his courage, Andras forcefully mispronounced his need and pointed to the sign in the window.

The concierge understood. She beckoned him into a narrow tiled hall and led him up a spiral staircase with a skylight at the top. When they could go no higher, she took him down the hall to a long narrow garret with an iron bed against one wall, a crockery basin on a wooden stand, a farm table, a green wooden chair. Two dormer windows looked out onto the rue des Écoles; one of them was open, and on the windowsill sat an abandoned nest and the remnants of three blue eggs. In the fireplace there was a rusted grate, a broken toasting fork, an ancient crust of bread. The concierge shrugged and named a price. Andras searched his mind for the names of numbers, then cut the price in half. The concierge spat on the floor, stomped her feet, railed at Andras in French, and finally accepted his offer.

So it began: his life in Paris. He had an address, a brass key, a view. His view, like József’s, included the Panthéon and the pale limestone clock tower of St.-Étienne-du-Mont. Across the street was the Collège de France, and soon enough he would learn to use it as a marker for his building: 34 rue des Écoles, en face du Collège de France. Down the block was the Sorbonne. And farther away, down the boulevard Raspail, was the École Spéciale d’Architecture, where classes would begin on Monday. Once he had cleaned the room from top to bottom and unpacked his clothes into an apple crate, he counted his money and made a shopping list. He went down to the shops and bought a glass jar full of red currant jam, a box of cheap tea, a box of sugar, a mesh strainer, a bag of walnuts, a small brown crock of butter, a long baguette, and, as a single extravagance, a tiny nugget of cheese.

What a pleasure it was to fit his key to the lock, to open the door to his private room. He unloaded his groceries onto the windowsill and laid out his drawing supplies on the table. Then he sat down, sharpened a pencil with his knife, and sketched his view of the Panthéon onto a blank postal card. On its reverse he wrote his first message from Paris: Dear Tibor, I am here! I have a desperate garret; it’s everything I hoped for. On Monday I start school. Hurrah! Liberté, egalité, fraternité! With love, Andras. All he lacked was a stamp. He thought he might borrow one from the concierge; he knew there was a postbox around the corner. As he tried to picture exactly where it was, what came to mind instead was the recollection of an envelope, a wax seal, a monogram. He had forgotten the promise he’d made to the elder Mrs. Hász. Her missive to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné still waited in his suitcase. He dragged the case out from beneath the bed, half fearing that the letter would be gone, but it was there in the pocket where he’d put it, the wax seal intact. He ran downstairs to the concierge’s apartment and, with the help of his phrase book and a series of urgent gestures, begged a pair of stamps. After a search, he located the boîte aux lettres and slipped Tibor’s card inside. Then, imagining the pleasure of some silver-haired gentleman when the next day’s mail arrived, he dropped Mrs. Hász’s letter into the anonymous dark of the box.