The Invisible Bridge (15 page)

"This is a surprise," Madame Morgenstern said, lifting her gray eyes to his own.

"I was out for a ramble," Andras said, too quickly. "Studying the quartier."

"Monsieur Levi is a student of architecture," Madame Morgenstern told the girl.

"Someday he'll design grand buildings."

"My father's a doctor," the girl said absently, not looking at either of them.

Andras stood beside Madame Morgenstern and warmed his hands at the stove, his fingers inches from her own. He looked at her fingernails, the slim taper of her digits, the lines of the birdlike bones beneath the skin. She caught him looking, and he turned his face away. They warmed their hands in silence as they waited for the girl's father, who materialized a few minutes later: a short mustachioed man with a monocle, carrying a doctor's bag.

"Sophie, where are your glasses?" he asked, pulling his mouth into a frown.

The little girl fished a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles from her satchel.

"Please, Madame," he said. "If you can, be sure she wears them."

"I'll try," Madame Morgenstern said, and smiled.

"They fall off when I dance," the girl protested.

"Say goodbye, Sophie," the doctor said. "We'll be late for dinner."

In the doorway, Sophie turned and waved. Then she and her father were gone, and Andras stood alone in the studio with Madame Morgenstern. She stepped away from the stove to gather a few things the children had left behind: a stray glove, a hairpin, a red scarf. She put all the things into a basket which she set beside the piano.
Objets trouves
.

"I wanted to thank you again," Andras said, when the silence between them had stretched to an intolerable length. It came out more gruffly than he'd intended, and in Hungarian, a low rural growl. He cleared his throat and repeated it in French.

"Please, Andras," she said in Hungarian, laughing. "You wrote such a lovely note.

And there was no need to thank me in the first place. I'm certain it wasn't the most pleasant afternoon for you."

He couldn't tell her what the afternoon had been like for him, or what the past week had been like. He saw again in his mind the way she'd smiled and tugged at her sweater when she'd recognized him, that involuntary and self-conscious act. He crushed his cap in his hands, looking at the polished studio floor. There were heavy footsteps on the floor above, Elisabet's, or Mrs. Apfel's.

"Have we put you off for good?" Madame Morgenstern asked. "Can you come again tomorrow? Elisabet will have a friend here for lunch, and maybe we'll go skating in the Bois de Vincennes afterward."

"I don't have skates," he said, almost inaudibly.

"Neither do we," she said. "We always rent them. It's lovely. You'll enjoy it."

It's lovely, you'll enjoy it
, as if it were really going to happen. And then he said yes, and it was.

THIS TIME, when he went to lunch on the rue de Sevigne, he didn't wear a costume tie and he didn't bring a bushel of wilting flowers; instead he wore an old favorite shirt and brought a bottle of wine and a pear tart from the bakery next door. As before, Mrs. Apfel laid out a feast: a layered egg-and-potato
rakott krumpli
, a tureen of carrot soup, a hash of red cabbage and apples with caraway, a dark peasant loaf, and three kinds of cheese. Madame Morgenstern was in a quiet mood; she seemed grateful for the presence of Elisabet's friend, a stout heavy-browed girl in a brown woolen dress. This was the Marthe with whom Elisabet had gone to the movies the week before. She kept Elisabet talking about goings-on at school: who had made a fool of herself in geography class and who had won a choir solo and who was going to Switzerland to ski during the winter holidays. Every now and then Elisabet threw a glance at Andras, as if she wanted him to take note of the fact that the conversation excluded him. Outside, a light snow had begun to fall. Andras couldn't wait to get out of the house. It was a relief when the pear tart was cut and eaten, when they could put their coats on and go.

At half past two they rode the Metro to the Bois. When they emerged from the station, Elisabet and Marthe hurried ahead, arm in arm, while Madame Morgenstern walked with Andras. She spoke about her students, about the upcoming winter pageant, about the recent cold snap. She was wearing a close-fitting red woolen hat shaped like a bell; the loose ends of her hair curled from its edge, and snowflakes gathered on its crown.

Inside the snowy Bois, between the barren elms and oaks and frosted evergreens, the paths were full of men and women carrying skates. From the lake came the shouts and calls of skaters, the scrape of blades on ice. They came to a break in the trees, and before them lay the frozen lake with its small central islands, its fenced banks crowded with Parisians. On the ice, serious-looking men and women in winter coats moved in a slow sweep around the islands. A warming house with a scalloped glass entryway stood on a shallow rise. According to a sign lettered in red, skates could be rented there for three francs. Elisabet and Marthe led their little group into the warming house and they waited in line at the rental counter. Andras insisted on renting skates for all of them; he tried not to think about what those twelve vanished francs would mean to him in the coming week. On a damp green bench they exchanged their shoes for skates, and soon afterward they were staggering downhill on a rubber path toward the lake.

Andras stepped onto the ice and cut a chain of arcs toward the larger of the two islands, testing the edge and balance of the blades. Tibor had taught him to skate when he was five years old; they had skated every day on the millpond in Konyar, on blades their father had made from scrapwood edged with heavy-gauge wire. As schoolboys in Debrecen they had skated at an outdoor rink on Piac utca, a perfect manmade oval artificially cooled by underground pipes and groomed to a glassine smoothness. Andras was light and nimble on skates, faster than his brothers or his friends. Even now, on these dull rental blades, he felt agile and swift. He cut between the skaters in their dark woolen coats, his jacket fluttering behind him, his cap threatening to fly from his head. If he had paused to notice, he might have seen young men watching him with envy as he sped by; he might have seen the girls' curious glances, the elderly skaters' looks of disapproval.

But he was aware only of the pure thrill of flying across the ice, the quick exchange of heat between his blades and the frozen lake. He made a circuit around the larger island, coming up behind the women at top speed, then slipped between Madame Morgenstern and Elisabet so neatly that they both stopped and gasped.

"Do you mind watching where you're going?" Elisabet said in her curt French.

"You could hurt someone." She took Marthe's arm and the two of them pushed past him.

And Andras was left to skate with Madame Morgenstern through a drifting tulle of snow.

"You're quick on your feet," she said, and gave him a fleeting smile from beneath the bell of her hat.

"Maybe on the ice," Andras said, blushing. "I was never very good at sports."

"You look as if you knew something about dancing, though."

"Only that I'm not very good at that, either."

She laughed and skated ahead of him. In the gray afternoon light, the lake brought to mind the Japanese paintings Andras had seen at the International Exposition; the evergreens spread their dark feathers against a wash of sky, and the hills were like doves huddled together for warmth. Madame Morgenstern moved easily on the ice, her back held straight, her arms rounded, as though this were just another form of ballet. She never stumbled against Andras or leaned on him as they circled the lake; even when she hit a sprig of evergreen and lost her balance, she skipped onto the other blade without a glance at him. But as they cleared the far end of the smaller island a second time, she drifted to his side.

"My brother and I used to skate in Budapest," she said. "We used to go to the Varosliget, not far from our house. You know the beautiful lake there, by the Vajdahunyad Castle?"

"Oh, yes." He'd never been able to afford the entry fee while he'd lived in Budapest, but he and Tibor had gone many times to watch the skaters at night. The castle, an amalgam of a thousand years of architectural styles, had been built for a millennial celebration forty years earlier. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements melted into one another along the length of the building; to walk along that strange facade was to pass through centuries. The castle was lit from below, and there was always music. Now he imagined two children, Madame Morgenstern and her brother--Jozsef Hasz's father?--casting their own dark shadows across the lighter shadow of the castle.

"Was your brother a good skater?" he asked.

Madame Morgenstern laughed and shook her head. "Neither of us was very good, but we had a good time. Sometimes I would invite my friends to come along. We would link hands and my brother would lead us along like a string of wooden ducks. He was ten years older, and far more patient than I would have been." She pressed her lips together as she skated on, tucking her hands into her sleeves. Andras kept close beside her, catching glimpses of her profile beneath the low brim of her hat.

"I can teach you a waltz, if you'd like," he said.

"Oh, no. I can't do anything fancy."

"It's not fancy," he said, and skated ahead to show her the steps. It was a simple waltz he'd learned in Debrecen as a ten-year-old: three strokes forward, a long arc, and a turn; three strokes backward, another arc, another turn. She repeated the steps, following him as he traced them on the ice. Then he turned to face her. Drawing a breath, he put a hand at her waist. Her arm came around him and her gloved hand found his hand. He hummed a few bars of "Brin de Muguet" and led her into the steps. She hesitated at first, particularly at the turns, but soon she was moving as lightly as he might have imagined, her hand firm against his hand. He knew that Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov would have laughed to see him dancing like this in front of everyone, but he didn't care. For a few moments, the length of the song in his head, this light-footed woman in her bell-shaped hat was pressed close against him, her hand closed inside his hand. His mouth brushed the brim of her hat, and he tasted a cold damp veil of snowflakes. He could feel her breath against his neck. She glanced up at him and their eyes caught for an instant before he looked away. He reminded himself that anything he felt for her was hopeless; she was an adult woman with a complicated life, a profession, a daughter in high school.

The waltz ended and went silent in his head. He let his arms fall from her body, and she moved away to skate at his side. They skated twice around the island before she spoke again.

"You make me homesick for Hungary," she said. "It's more than sixteen years since I was there. Elisabet's lifetime." She scanned the ice, and Andras followed her gaze.

They could see the green and brown of Elisabet's and Marthe's coats far ahead. Elisabet pointed to something on the shore, the black shape of a dog leaping after a smaller, fleeter shape.

"Sometimes I think I might go back," Madame Morgenstern said in a half whisper. "More often, though, I think I never will."

"You will," Andras said, surprised to find his voice steady. He took her arm, and she didn't pull away. Instead she removed a hand from her coat sleeve and let it rest upon his arm. He shivered, though he could no longer feel the cold. They skated that way in silence for the time it took to circle the islet once more. But then a voice reached them from across the ice, resonant and familiar: It was Madame Gerard, calling his name and Madame Morgenstern's.
Andraska. Klarika
. The Hungarian diminutives, as though they were all still in Budapest. Madame Gerard came gliding toward them in a new fur-collared coat and hat, followed by three other actors from the theater. She and Madame Morgenstern embraced, laughed, remarked on the beauty of the snow and the number of people on the frozen lake.

"Klarika, my dear, I'm very glad to see you. And here's Andraska. And that must be Elisabet up ahead." She smiled slyly and gave Andras a wink, then called Elisabet and Marthe back to the group. When they complained of the cold, she invited everyone for hot chocolate at the cafe. They sat together at a long wooden table and drank chocolate from crockery mugs, and it was easy for Andras to let everyone else talk, to let their conversation join the conversations of other skaters in the crowded warming house. The rising feeling he'd had just before Madame Gerard had arrived had already begun to dissipate; Madame Morgenstern seemed once again impossibly far away.

When they were finished with the chocolate, he retrieved their shoes from the rental desk, and afterward they walked together along the path toward the edge of the Bois. He kept looking for his chance to take Madame Morgenstern's elbow, to let the others go on ahead while the two of them walked behind. Instead it was Marthe who dropped back to walk with Andras. She was purposeful and grim in the deepening cold.

"It's hopeless, you know," she said. "She wants nothing to do with you."

"Who?" Andras said, alarmed to think he'd been so transparent.

"Elisabet! She wants you to stop looking at her all the time. Do you think she likes being looked at by a pathetic Hungarian?"

Andras sighed and glanced up ahead to where Elisabet was now walking with Madame Gerard, her green coat swinging around her legs. She stooped to say something to Madame, who threw her head back and laughed.

"She's not interested in you," Marthe said. "She's already got a boyfriend. So there's no need to come to the house again. And you don't have to waste your time trying to charm her mother."

Andras cleared his throat. "All right," he said. "Well, thank you for telling me."

Marthe gave a businesslike nod. "It's my duty as Elisabet's friend."

And then they had reached the edge of the park, and Madame Morgenstern was beside him again, her sleeve brushing his own. They stood at the entrance to the Metro, the rush of trains echoing below. "Won't you come with us?" she said.