The Invisible Bridge (19 page)

But at intermission, when he might really have gone backstage, he was hit by a wave of panic so deep and cold he could hardly breathe. He went downstairs to the men's washroom, where he locked himself into a stall and tried to slow his racing pulse. He leaned his forehead against the cool marble of the wall. The voices of men all around him had a soothing effect; they were fathers, they sounded like fathers. He could almost imagine that when he came out, his own father would be waiting. Lucky Bela, though sparing with words of advice, would tell him what to do. But when he came out, no one he knew was waiting; he was alone in Paris, and Klara was upstairs.

The lights flickered to signal the end of the intermission. He went up and took his seat again just as the house fell into darkness. A few rustling moments, and then blue lights glowed from the lighting bar beneath the catwalk; a high cold string of woodwind notes climbed from the orchestra pit, and the snowflakes drifted out to begin their dance.

He knew Klara was standing just behind the stage-left curtain. She was the one who had signaled the musicians to begin. The girls danced perfectly, and were replaced by taller girls, and after that taller girls still, as if the same girls were growing older backstage during the moments when the lights dimmed. But at the end of the show they all came onstage to bow, and they called out for their teacher.

She came out in a simple black dress, an orange-red dahlia pinned behind her ear, like a girl in a Mucha painting. First she made her reverence to the young dancers, then to the audience. She acknowledged the musicians and the conductor. Then she disappeared into the wings again, allowing the girls to reap the glory of their curtain calls.

Andras sensed the return of his panic, heard its millipedal footsteps drawing closer. Before it could take him again he slid out of his row and ran backstage, where Klara was surrounded by a mass of rouged, tulle-skirted girls. He couldn't get anywhere near her. But she seemed to be looking for him, or for someone in particular; she let her gaze drift over the heads of the little girls and move toward the darker edges of the wings.

Her eyes flickered past him and returned for an instant. He couldn't tell if her smile had darkened just at that moment, or if he had imagined it. In any case, she'd seen him. He took off his hat and stood twisting its brim until the crowd around her began to subside.

As the parents rushed backstage to bestow bouquets on their children, he cursed himself for failing to bring flowers. He saw that many of the parents had brought roses for her as well as for their daughters. She would have a cartload of bouquets to bring home, none of them from him. The father of the bespectacled little Sophie had brought a particularly large sheaf of flowers for Madame--red roses, Andras noted. He saw her cordially refuse countless invitations to celebratory post-performance dinners; she claimed she was exhausted and must have her rest. It was nearly an hour before the little girls had all gone home with their families, leaving Klara and Andras alone backstage. He had twisted his hat entirely out of shape by then. Her arms were full of flowers; he couldn't embrace her or even take her hand.

"You didn't have to wait," she said, giving him a half-reproachful smile.

"You've got a lot of roses there" was what he managed to say.

"Have you had dinner?"

He hadn't, and he told her so. In the prop room he found a basket for her flowers.

He loaded it and covered it with a cloth to protect the roses from the cold. As he helped her into her coat, he received a wondering look from Pely, the custodian, who had already begun to sweep up the evening's snowfall of sequins and rose petals. Andras raised his hat in farewell and they went out through the backstage door.

She took his arm as they walked along, and let him lead her to a whitewashed cafe near the Bastille. It was a place he'd passed many times in his walks around Paris; it was called Aux Marocaines. On the low tables were green bowls of cardamom pods. On the walls, wooden racks held Moroccan pottery. Everything seemed to be built on a small scale, as if made for Klara. He could afford to buy her dinner there, though just barely; a week earlier he had received a Christmas bonus from Monsieur Novak.

A waiter in a fez seated them shoulder to shoulder at a corner table. There was flatbread and honey wine, a piece of grilled fish, a vegetable stew in a clay pot. As they ate they talked only about the performance, and about Elisabet, who had departed with Marthe for Chamonix; they talked about Andras's work, and about his examinations, which he'd passed with top marks. But he was always aware of her heat and movement beside him, her arm brushing his arm. When she drank, he watched her lips touch the rim of the glass. He couldn't stop looking at the curve of her breasts beneath her close-wrapped dress.

After dinner they had strong coffee and tiny pink macaroons. Still, neither of them had mentioned what had happened the previous night--not their conversation about her family, nor what had passed between them afterward. A time or two Andras thought he saw a shadow move across her features; he waited for her to reproach him, to say she wished he'd never told her that he'd met her mother and sister-in-law, or that she hadn't meant to give him a mistaken impression. When she didn't, he began to wonder if she meant for them to pretend it had never happened. At the end of the meal he paid the bill, despite her protests; he helped her into her coat again and they walked toward the rue de Sevigne. He carried the heavy basket of flowers, thinking of the ridiculous bouquet he'd brought to that first Sunday lunch. How ignorant he'd been of what was about to befall him, how unprepared for everything he'd experienced since--the shock of attraction, the torment of her closeness on Sunday afternoons, the guilty pleasure of their growing familiarity, and then that unthinkable moment last night when she'd closed her hands around his hands--when she'd put her arms around his waist, her head against his chest.

And what would happen now? The evening was almost over. They had nearly reached her house. A light snow began to fall as they rounded the corner of her street.

At the doorstep her eyes darkened again. She leaned against the door and sighed, looking down at the roses. "Funny," she said. "We've done the winter show every December for years, but I always feel this way afterward. Like there's nothing to look forward to. Like
everything's
finished." She smiled. "Dramatic, isn't it?"

He let out a long breath. "I'm sorry if--last night," he began.

She stopped him with a shake of her head and told him there was nothing to apologize for.

"I shouldn't have asked about your family," he said. "If you'd wanted to talk about it, you would have."

"Probably not," she said. "It's become such a habit with me, keeping everything secret." She shook her head again, and he experienced the return of a memory from his early childhood--a night he'd spent hiding in the orchard while his brother Matyas lay in bed, gravely ill with fever. A doctor had been called in, plasters applied, medicines dispensed, all to no effect; the fever rose and rose, and everyone seemed to believe Matyas would die. Meanwhile, Andras hid in the branches of an apple tree with his terrible secret: He himself had passed the fever along, playing with Matyas after their mother told him he must keep away at all costs. If Matyas died, it would be his fault. He had never been so lonely in his life. Now he touched Klara's shoulder and felt her shiver.

"You're cold," he said.

She shook her head. Then she took her key from her little purse and turned to unlock the door. But her hand began to tremble, and she turned back toward him and raised her face to him. He bent to her and brushed the corner of her mouth with his lips.

"Come in," she said. "Just for a moment."

His pulse thundering at his temples, Andras stepped in after her. He put a hand at her waist and drew her toward him. She looked up at him, her eyes wet, and then he lifted her against him and kissed her. He closed the door with one hand. Held her. Kissed her again. Took off his thin jacket, unbuttoned the glossy black buttons of her coat, pushed it from her shoulders. He stood in the entryway with her and kissed her and kissed her--first her mouth, then her neck at the margins of her dress, then the hollow between her breasts.

He untied the black silk ribbon at her waist. The dress fell around her feet in a dark pool, and there she was before him in a rose-colored slip and stockings, the red-gold dahlia in her hair. He buried his hands in her dark curls and drew her to him. She kissed him again and slid her hands under his shirt. He heard himself saying her name; again he touched the bead-row of her spine, the curve of her hips. She lifted herself against him. It couldn't be true; it was true.

They went upstairs to her bedroom. He would remember it as long as he lived: the way they moved awkwardly through the doorway, his persistent certainty that she would change her mind, his disbelief as she lifted the rose-colored slip over her head. The quick work she made of his embarrassing sock braces, his poorly darned socks, his underclothes worn to transparency. The shallow curves of her dancer's body, the neat tuck of her navel, the shadow between her legs. The cool embrace of her bed, her own bed. The softness of her skin. Her breasts. His certainty that it would all be over in an embarrassing flash the instant she touched him with her hand; his wild concentration on anything else as she did it. The word
baiser
in his mind. The unbearable thrill of being able to touch her. The shock of the heat inside her. It could have all ended then--the city of Paris, the world, the universe--and he wouldn't have cared, would have died happy, could have found no heaven broader or more drenched with light.

Afterward they lay on the bed and he stared at the ceiling, at its pattern of pressed flowers and leaves. She turned onto her side and put a hand on his chest. A velvety drowsiness pinned him to the bed, his head on her pillow. Her scent was in his hair, on his hands, everywhere.

"Klara," he said. "Am I dead? Are you still here?"

"I'm still here," she said. "You're not dead."

"What are we supposed to do now?"

"Nothing," she said. "Just lie here for a little while."

"All right," he said, and lay there.

After a few minutes she removed her hand from his chest and rolled away from him, then got out of bed and went off down the hall. A moment later he heard the thunder of running water and the low roar and hiss of a gas heater. When she reappeared in the bedroom doorway, she was wearing a dressing gown.

"Come have a bath," she said.

She didn't have to coax him. He followed her into the white-tiled bathroom, where water steamed into the porcelain tub. She let the dressing gown drop and climbed into the water as he stood watching, speechless. He could have stood there all night while she bathed. Her image burned itself into his retinas: the small, high breasts; the twin wings of her hips; the smooth plane of her belly. And now, in the electric light of the bathroom, he saw something he hadn't noticed before: a crescent-shaped scar with faint stitch-marks, just above the neat dark triangle of her hair. He stepped forward to touch her. He ran his hand along her belly, down to the scar, and brushed it with his fingers.

"She was a difficult birth," Klara said. "In the end, a cesarean. She was too much for me, even then."

Andras had an unbidden vision of Klara as a fifteen-year-old, straining upward on a metal table. The image hit him like a train. His knees seemed to liquefy, and he had to brace himself against the wall.

"Come in with me," she said, and gave him her hand. He climbed into the bathtub and sank down into the water. She took the cloth and washed him from head to toe; she poured shampoo into her hands and massaged it into his scalp. Then they made love again, slowly, in the bathtub, and she showed him how to touch her, and he concluded that his life was over, that he would never want to do anything else in this lifetime. Then he washed her as she had washed him, every inch of her, and then they staggered to bed.

Nothing in his life had prepared him to imagine that a series of days might be spent the way they spent the next ten days. Later, in the darkest moments of the years that followed, he would come back again and again to those days, reminding himself that if he died, and if death led him into formless silence instead of into some other brighter life, he would still have experienced those days with Klara Morgenstern.

The Brecht play had gone dark for the holidays; Elisabet would be in Chamonix until the second of January. The studio was closed; school was out until after the new year; Andras's friends had gone home for the duration. Mrs. Apfel had gone to her daughter-in-law's cottage in Aixen-Provence. Even the signs advertising meetings of anti-Jewish organizations had ceased to appear. At all hours of the day, the streets were filled with people out shopping or on their way to parties. Klara had been invited to half a dozen parties herself, but she cancelled all her engagements. Andras went to his cold attic for some articles of clothing and his sketchbooks, locked the door behind him, and decamped to the rue de Sevigne.

They went on an expedition for provisions: potatoes for potato pancakes, cold roast chicken, bread, cheese, wine, a cake packed with currants. At a music shop on rue Montmartre they bought records for five francs apiece, comic operettas and American jazz and ballets. With their arms full and their pockets empty, they returned to Klara's apartment and set up house. Chanukah began that night. They made potato pancakes, filling the kitchen with the rich smell of hot oil, and they lit candles. They made love in the kitchen and in the bedroom and once, awkwardly, on the stairs. The next day they went skating at the other skating pond, the one at the Bois de Boulogne, where they were unlikely to see anyone they knew. The skaters at the park wore bright colors against the gray of the afternoon; there was a marked-off patch at the center of the ice where the more adroit among them executed spins. Andras and Klara skated until their lips were blue with cold. Every night they bathed together; every morning they woke and made love. Andras received an astonishing education in the ways a human being could experience pleasure. At night, when he woke and thought of Klara, it amazed him that he could turn over and curl himself around her. He surprised her with his knowledge of cookery, gained from watching his mother. He could make
palacsinta
, thin egg pancakes, with chocolate or jam or apple filling; he could make
paprikas burgonya
and spaetzle, and red cabbage with caraway seeds. They slept long and gloriously in the afternoons.