Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Mr. Lévi,” she said. “Are you well? You look a bit pale.” She crossed the room to take his hand, her expression stoic, as if she were bracing for bad news.

“I’m well,” he said. “And so is Klara.”

She regarded him with frank surprise, and József’s mother rose too. “Mr. Lévi,” she began, and paused, apparently unsure of how she might caution him without revealing too much to her son.

“Who is Klara?” József said. “Surely you don’t mean Klara Hász?”

“I do,” Andras said. And he explained how he’d carried a letter to Klara from her mother two years earlier, and then how he’d been introduced to her. “She lives under the name of Morgenstern now. You know her daughter. Elisabet.”

József sat down slowly on the damask chair, looking as though Andras had struck him with a fist. “Elisabet?” he said. “Do you mean to say that Elisabet Morgenstern is Klara’s daugher? Klara, my lost aunt?” And then he must have remembered the rumors of what had existed between Andras and the mother of Elisabet Morgenstern, because he seemed to focus more sharply on Andras, staring at him as if he’d never seen him before.

“Why have you come?” the younger Mrs. Hász asked. “What is it you want to tell us?”

And finally Andras broke the news he had come to deliver: that Klara was not only well, but here in Budapest, staying at a hotel in the Ferencváros. As soon as he’d spoken, Klara’s mother’s eyes filled with tears; then her expression became overshadowed with terror. Why, she asked, had Klara had undertaken such a terrible risk?

“I’m afraid I’m partly to blame,” Andras said. “I had to return to Budapest myself. And Klara and I are engaged to be married.”

At those words, a kind of pandemonium broke upon the sitting room. József’s mother lost her composure entirely; in a panic-laced soprano she demanded to know how such a thing could have come to pass, and then she declared that she didn’t want to know, that it was absurd and unthinkable. She called the housemaid and and asked for her heart medication, and then told József to fetch his father from the bank immediately. A moment later she retracted the command on the basis that György’s hasty exit in the middle of the day might raise unnecessary suspicion. Meanwhile, the elder Mrs. Hász implored Andras to tell her where Klara might be found, whether she was safe, and how she might be visited. Andras, at the center of this maelstrom, began to wonder whether he would emerge on the other side of it still engaged to Klara, or if her brother and his wife could exercise some esoteric power that would nullify any attachment between a member of Klara’s class and one of his own. Already József Hász was looking at Andras with an unfamiliar, perhaps even a hostile expression-of confusion, betrayal, and, most disturbingly to Andras, distrust.

Soon it became clear that the elder Mrs. Hász could not be prevented from going to Klara at once. She had already called for the car; she wanted Andras to accompany her. The chauffeur would drive them halfway to the tiny hotel on Cukor utca, and they would walk the remaining blocks. József, without a parting word to Andras, took his mother upstairs to tend to her nerves. Klara’s mother gave Andras a single look that seemed to indicate how ridiculous she considered her daughter-in-law’s behavior to be. She threw a coat over her dress and they ran outside to the waiting car. As they drove through the streets she begged him to tell her if Klara were well, and what she looked like now, and, finally, whether she wanted to see her mother.

“More than anything,” Andras said. “You must know that.”

“Eighteen years!” she said in a half whisper, and then fell silent, overcome.

A few moments later the car let them out at the base of Andrássy út, and Andras put a hand on Mrs. Hász’s elbow as they hurried through the streets. Her hair loosened from its knot as she went, and her hastily tied scarf fell from her neck; Andras caught the square of violet silk in his fingertips as they entered the narrow lobby of the hotel. At the foot of the cast-iron stair a wordless trepidation seemed to take Klara’s mother. She climbed the steps with a slow and deliberate tread, as though she needed time to rehearse in her mind a few of her thousand imaginings of this moment. When Andras indicated that they’d reached the correct floor, she followed him down the hall without a word and watched gravely as he took the key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was Klara at the window in her fawn-colored dress, midmorning light falling across her face, a handkerchief crushed in her hand. Her mother approached like a somnambulist; she went to the window, took Klara’s hands, touched her face, pronounced her name. Klara, trembling, laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and wept. And there they stood in shuddering silence as Andras watched. Here was the reverse of what he’d witnessed a few weeks earlier at Elisabet’s embarkation: a vanished child returned, the intangible made real. He knew the reunion was taking place on the shabby top floor of a cramped hotel room on an unlovely street in Budapest, but he felt he was witnessing a kind of unearthly reconnection, a conjunction so stunning he had to turn away. Here was the closing of the distance between Klara’s past life and her present; it seemed not unthinkable that he and she might enter a new life together now. At that time his difficulties at the Budapest visa office had not yet begun. The French border was still open. All seemed possible.

Now, four weeks later, what he had learned for certain was that he wouldn’t return to Paris as they’d hoped. Worse than that: He’d soon be sent far away from Klara, into a distant and unknown forest. When he arrived at Benczúr utca that afternoon with the news he’d just delivered to his brother-that he was to be deployed to Carpatho-Ruthenia in three weeks’ time-he found to his relief that no one was awaiting him besides Klara herself. She’d asked to have tea served in her favorite upstairs room, a pretty boudoir with a window seat that faced the garden. When she was a child, she told Andras, this was where she had come when she wanted to be alone. She called it the Rabbit Room because of the beautiful Dürer engraving that hung above the mantel: a young hare posed in half profile, its soft-furred haunches bunched, its ears rotated back. She’d lit a fire in the grate and requested pastries for their tea. But once he told her what he’d learned at the battalion office, they could only sit in silence and stare at the plate of walnut and poppyseed strudel.

“You’ve got to get home as soon as the French border opens again,” he said, finally. “It terrifies me to think of the danger you’re in.”

“ Paris won’t be safer,” she said. “It could be bombed at any time.”

“You could go to the countryside with Mrs. Apfel. You could go to Nice.”

She shook her head. “I won’t leave you here. We’re going to be married.”

“But it’s madness to stay,” he said. “Sooner or later they’ll learn who you are.”

“There’s nothing for me in Paris now. Elisabet’s gone. You’re here. And my mother, and György. I can’t go back, Andras.”

“What about your friends, your students, the rest of your life?”

She shook her head. “ France is at war. My students are gone to the countryside. I’d have to close the school in any case, at least for a time. Perhaps the war will be a short one. With any luck it’ll be over before you finish your military service. Then you’ll get another visa and we’ll go home together.”

“And all that time you’ll stay here, in peril?”

“I’ll live quietly under your surname. No one will have reason to come looking for me. I’ll rent the apartment and studio in Paris and take a little place in the Jewish Quarter here. Maybe I’ll teach a few private students.”