Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“I don’t know,” Elisabet said, still crying. “I’m sorry.” She twisted the shorn ends of her hair self-consciously; without the long yellow braid, her head looked oddly small and bereft. The bob drew attention to her pale naked mouth. “I was frightened, too. I didn’t know if I could bear to say goodbye.”

“And you,” Klara said, turning to Paul. “Was this how you left your mother when you came to France?”

“Ah-no, Madame.”

“Ah-no, indeed! In the future you’ll treat me with the respect you’d give your own mother, if you please.”

“I apologize, Madame.” He looked genuinely chastened. Andras wondered if his own mother had ever spoken to him in such a tone. He tried to conjure up an image of Paul’s mother, but all he could muster was a jodhpur-clad version of the Baroness Kaczynska, a sixteenth-century aristocrat whose complicated history and lineage he’d had to study at school in Debrecen.

“Do you really mean to be married by a sea captain?” Klara asked her daughter. “Is that what you’d like?”

“It’s what we’ve decided,” Elisabet said. “I think it’s exciting.”

“So I’m not to see you married, then.”

“You’ll see me after I’m married. When we come back to visit.”

“And when do you imagine that will be?” Klara said. “When do you think you’ll be able to buy passage back across an ocean? Particularly if your husband’s parents don’t accept your union?”

“We thought maybe you’d want to come live in the States,” Paul said. “To be close to the children and all, when we have children.”

“And what about my own children?” Klara said. “It might not be an easy thing for me to dash across an ocean.”

“What children?”

She looked at Andras and took his hand. “Our children.”

“Maman!” Elisabet said. “You can’t mean you plan to have children with-!” She cocked a thumb at Andras.

“We may. We’ve discussed it.”

“But you’re un femme d’un certain age!”

Klara laughed. “We’re all of a certain age, aren’t we? You, for example, are of an age at which it’s impossible to understand how thirty-two might seem like the beginning of a life, rather than the end of one.”

“But I’m your child,” Elisabet said, looking as though she might cry again.

“Of course you are,” Klara said, and tucked one of Elisabet’s short blond locks behind her ear. “That’s why I came here to you. I couldn’t let you go across the ocean without saying a proper goodbye.”

“Mesdames,” Andras said. “Pardon me. I think Mr. Camden and I will take a walk now and leave you alone.”

“That’s right,” Paul said. “We’ll go down to see the ship.”

It had all become rather overwhelming; there had been too much crying already for Paul’s taste, and Andras had become lightheaded at the mention of his future children. It was a relief to them both to take leave of Klara and Elisabet and strike out on their own.

They walked through a street market on their way to the docks, past men selling mackerel and sole and langoustines, boxes of myrtilles, net sacks of summer squashes, tiny yellow plums by the dozen. Families on holiday thronged the streets, so many children in sailor suits they might have formed a child navy. Self-consciously, as if the outpouring of emotion they’d just witnessed had threatened their masculinity, Andras and Paul talked of ships and of sports, and then, as they passed an English navy ship docked in one of the enormous berths, of the prospect of war. Everyone had hoped that Chamberlain’s declaration of support for Poland might lead to a few weeks of calm over the Danzig question, and perhaps even a peaceable settlement in the end, but Hitler had just concluded a meeting at Berchtesgaden with the leader of Danzig’s Nazi Party and had sent a warship into the Free City’s port. If Germany claimed Danzig, then England and France would go to war. That week, French aircraft had staged a mock attack on London to test the readiness of England’s air-defense system. Some Londoners had thought war had already broken out, and three people had been killed in a rush to the air-raid shelters.

“What do you think America will do?” Andras asked.

Paul shrugged. “Roosevelt will issue an ultimatum, I guess.”

“Hitler doesn’t fear Roosevelt. Look what happened last April.”

“Well, I don’t claim to know much about it,” Paul said, raising his hands in a pantomime of self-defense. “I’m just a painter. Most days I don’t even read the news.”

“Your fiancée is Jewish,” Andras said. “Her family is here. The war will affect her, whether America gets involved or not.”

They stood in silence for a long moment, looking at the ship with its spiny encrustation of guns. “What kind of service would you choose, if you had to fight?” Paul asked.

“Not the navy, that’s for certain,” Andras said. “The first time I saw the sea was a year ago. And nothing in a ditch. No trenches. I could learn to fly a plane, though. That’s what I’d like to do.”

Paul broke into a grin. “Me too,” he said. “I’ve always thought it would be fantastic to fly planes.”

“But I wouldn’t want to have to kill anyone,” Andras said.

“Right,” Paul said. “That’s the problem. I wouldn’t mind being a hero, though. I’d like to win medals.”

“Me too,” Andras said. It felt good, if slightly shameful, to admit it.

“See you in the air, then,” Paul said, and laughed, but there was something forced about it, as if the possibility of a war and his involvement in it had suddenly become real to him.

They’d reached the S.S. Île de France, its bulk towering above them like the leading edge of a glacier. Its hull was glossy with new paint; each letter of its name was as tall and as broad as a man. The sea sloshed around it in its berth, sending up a rich stink of dead fish and oil and dock weed, and something briny and calciferous that must have been the smell of seawater itself. The ship rose fifteen stories from the waterline; they could count five terraces from where they stood. The decks teemed with stevedores, sailors, chambermaids with their arms full of linen. Hundreds were making the final preparations for the departure of a small town’s worth of people on a seventeen-day voyage. There would be fifteen hundred passengers on board, Paul told him; there were five ballrooms, a cinema, a shooting gallery, a vast gymnasium, an indoor swimming pool, a hundred lifeboats. The ship was nearly eight hundred feet long and would travel at twenty-four knots. And on board was a surprise for Elisabet, one final extravagance: They had a stateroom with a private balcony, and he’d arranged for the delivery of three dozen white roses and a case of champagne.

“At least you got your hat reblocked,” Andras said. “Think what it would have cost to buy a new one.”

That evening they all dined together on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the water. They ate fresh clams in tomato broth and whole fish roasted with lemons and olives, drank two bottles of wine, talked about their childhood fancies and the exotic places they wanted to see before they died: India, Japan, Morocco. It was almost like a holiday. Klara was in high spirits for the first time in weeks, as if by having found Elisabet she might still avert the long-dreaded separation. But the new arrangements remained in place: Elisabet and Paul would sail in the morning. And as the evening went on, Andras became aware of a familiar tautness inside him, a coil that had been winding itself tighter by the day: It was the fear that once Elisabet had gone, Klara would somehow vanish too, as if the tension between them were what anchored them both to the earth.