The Invisible Bridge (28 page)

"This won't take long," she said. And then she told him he ought to know what kind of woman her mother was.

"I know what kind of woman she is," Andras said.

"You told her the truth about Paul and me. And now I'm going to tell you the truth about her."

She was angry, he reminded himself. She would do whatever she could to hurt him, would tell whatever lies it suited her to tell. In a sense, he owed it to her to listen; he had betrayed her, after all.

"All right," he said. "What do you want to tell me?"

"I suppose you think you're my mother's first lover since my father."

"I know she's led a complicated life," he said. "That's not news."

Elisabet gave a short, hard laugh. "Complicated! I wouldn't say so. It's simple, once you know the pattern. I've seen pathetic men fawning over her for as long as I can remember. She's always known what she wanted from them, and what she was worth.

How do you think she got the apartment and the studio? By dancing her heart out?"

It was all he could do not to slap her. He dug his nails into the palms of his hands.

"That's enough," he said. "I won't listen to this."

"Someone has to tell you the truth."

"Your mother doesn't take me for a fool, and neither should you."

"But

you

are
a fool, you stupid fool! She's playing a game with you, using you to make another man jealous. A real man, an adult, one with a job and money. You can read about it yourself." She produced a sheaf of envelopes from her leather schoolbag. A masculine hand; Klara's name. She took out another sheaf, and another. Stacks and stacks of letters. She peeled an envelope from the top of the pile, extracted the letter, and began to read.

"'My dear Odette.' That's what he calls her, his Odette, after the swan-princess in the ballet. 'Since last night I've done nothing but think of you. Your taste is still in my mouth. My hands are full of you. Your scent is everywhere in my house.'"

Andras took the letter from her hand. There were the lines she'd just read, in a familiar script; he turned it over to look for the signature. One initial: Z. The envelope bore a year-old postmark.

"Who do you think it is?" Elisabet said, her eyes fixed on his own. "It's your Monsieur Novak. Z is for Zoltan. She's been his mistress for eleven years. And when things go sour, as they do now and then, she takes up with idiots like you to drive him mad. He always comes back. That's how it works. Now you know."

A wave of hot needles rolled through him. He felt as though his lungs had been punctured, as though he couldn't draw a breath. "Are you finished?" he said.

She got up and smoothed the skirt of her pale green dress. "It might seem hard to take," she said. "But I can assure you it's no harder than what she's doing to me, now that she knows about Paul." And she left him there in the Tuileries with Novak's letters.

He didn't go to work. Instead he sat on the bench in that dusty corner of the park and read the letters. The oldest was dated January 1927. He read about Klara's first meeting with Novak after a dance performance; he read about Novak's failing struggle to stay faithful to his wife, and then he read Novak's half-exultant self-castigation after his first tryst with Klara. There were cryptic references to places where they must have made love--an opera box, a friend's cottage in Montmartre, a bedroom at a party, Novak's office at the Sarah-Bernhardt; there were notes in which Novak pleaded for a meeting, and notes in which he begged her to refuse to see him the next time he asked. There were references to arguments involving crises of conscience on both sides, and then a six-month break in the regular stream of letters--a time when they must have been apart and she must have begun seeing someone else, because the next letters made angry mention of a young dancer named Marcel. (Was this the Marcel, Andras wondered, who'd written Klara those postcards from Rome?) Novak demanded that she break off the liaison with Marcel; it was absurd, he wrote, to think that that young salamander's feelings could ever match his own. And she must have done as he wished, because the letters from Novak picked up their steady pace again, and they were once again full of affectionate reference to the time he'd spent with Klara. There were letters in which he wrote about the dance studio and the apartment he'd found for her, dull letters about the technicalities of the real-estate transaction; desperate notes about how he would leave his wife and come to live with her on the rue de Sevigne--marry her and adopt Elisabet--and sober-toned notes about why he couldn't. Then another break, and more letters referring to another lover of Klara's, this one a writer whose plays had been performed at the Sarah-Bernhardt; one week Novak swore that this was the final straw, that he was finished with Klara forever, but the next week he begged her to come to him, and the following week it was clear that she had done so--
what sweet relief to have you again, what fulfillment of my wildest
hopes
. Finally, in early 1937, it seemed his wife had learned from their lawyer that they owned a piece of property she hadn't known about; she'd confronted Novak, and he'd confessed. His wife had told him to make a choice. That was when he'd gone home to Hungary--to take a cure for a mild case of tuberculosis, as he'd told everyone, but also, in fact, to decide between his marriage and his mistress. It must have been on his way back from Hungary that Andras had met him at the train station. He'd come back full of remorse, ashamed at having wronged both Edith and Klara. He'd broken off his relations with Klara, and his wife had become pregnant. That piece of news had come in December. But the most recent letter was from just a few weeks ago, and concerned rumors that Klara had been seeing someone else--and not just anyone, but
Andras Levi
, the young Hungarian whom Zoltan had hired at the Sarah-Bernhardt last fall. He demanded that she explain herself, and begged her to do so in person at a certain hotel, on a certain afternoon; he would be waiting for her.

Andras sat on the bench with the stack of letters beside him. That afternoon, two weeks earlier--what had he been doing? Had he been at work? At school? He couldn't remember. Had she cancelled her classes, gone to meet Novak? Was she with him this very instant? He had the sudden desire to choke someone to death. Anyone would do: that brocaded matron beside the fountain with her bichon frise; that sad-looking girl beneath the limes; the policeman on the corner whose moustache seemed grotesquely like Novak's. He got to his feet, stuffed the letters into his bag, and walked back toward the river. It was dark now, a damp spring night. He stepped in front of cars that blared their horns at him, shouldered past men and women on the sidewalks, trudged through groups of clochards on the bridges. He didn't know what time it was, and didn't care. He was exhausted. He hadn't eaten anything and wasn't hungry. It was too late for him to show up at Forestier's now, but he didn't want to go home, either; there was a chance Klara might come to talk to him, and he couldn't bear the thought of seeing her. He didn't want to confront her about Novak; he was ashamed at having read the letters, at having allowed Elisabet to do this to him. He turned away and walked off down the rue des Ecoles to the place de la Sorbonne, where he sat at the edge of a fountain and listened to a one-legged accordionist playing the bitterest love songs he had ever heard. When he couldn't stand another measure he fled to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he fell into a fretful sleep on an elm-shadowed bench.

He awoke some time later in a humid blue dawn, his neck in a spasm from the way he'd slept. He remembered that some disaster had crushed him the night before; he could feel it rushing toward his consciousness again. And there it was: Zoltan Novak, the letters. He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and blinked at the morning. Before him on the grass two tiny rabbits browsed the clover. The first light of day came through the delicate endive leaves of their ears; they were so close he could hear the snip and grind of their teeth. The park was otherwise silent, and he was alone with what he knew about Klara and could not unknow.

He was right: She'd been at his apartment the night before. In fact she'd been looking for him all over town. He traced her movements through a series of increasingly anxious notes, which he received in reverse order. First the one she'd tacked to his drawing table at the studio:
A, where can you be? I've looked everywhere. Come see me
as soon as you get this. K.;
next the one she'd left in the care of the good Monsieur Forestier, who was more worried than angry when Andras came to work looking like he'd spent the previous night on a bench:
A, When you didn't come home I came here to look
for you. Going to check at school. K.;
and finally, at the end of what felt like the longest day he'd ever lived, the note she'd left for him at home, on the table downstairs:
A, I've
gone to look for you at Forestier's. Your K
. He climbed the five flights to his attic and opened the door. In the dark, there was the clatter of a chair falling over, and Klara's light tread on the floor, and then she was beside him. He lit a lamp and shrugged off his jacket.

"Andras," she said. "My God, what happened to you? Where have you been?"

"I don't want to talk," he said. "I'm going to bed." He couldn't look at her. Every time he did, he saw Novak's hands on her, his mouth on her mouth.
Your taste
. Nausea came at him in a towering wave, and he went to his knees beside the bed. When she put a hand on his shoulder he shrugged it away.

"What's wrong?" she said. "Look at me."

He couldn't. He stripped off his shirt and trousers and crawled into bed, his face to the wall. He heard her moving through the room behind him.

"You can't do this," she said. "We've got to talk."

"Go away," he said.

"This is crazy. You're acting like a child."

"Leave me alone, Klara."

"Not until you talk to me."

He sat up in bed, his eyes going hot. He wouldn't cry in front of her. Without a word, he got up and took the letters from his bag and threw them on the table.

"What are those?" she said.

"You tell me."

She picked up one of the letters. "Where did you get these?"

"Your daughter was kind enough to deliver them. It was her way of thanking me for telling you about Paul."

"What?"

"She thought I might want to know who else you were fucking."

"Oh, God!" she cried. "Unbelievable. She did this?"

"'Your taste is still in my mouth. My hands are full of you. Your scent is
everywhere in my house.'"
He peeled the letter off the pile and threw it at her. "Or this one:
'But for you, my life would be darkness.'
Or this:
'Thoughts of last night have
sustained me through this terrible day. When will you come to me again?'
And this one, from two weeks ago: '
... The Hotel St. Lazare, where I'll be waiting.'"

"Andras,

please--"

"Go to hell, Klara, go to hell! Get out of my house! I can't look at you."

"It's all in the past," she said. "I couldn't do it anymore. I never loved him."

"You were with him for eleven years! You slept with him three nights a week.

You left two other lovers for him. You let him buy you an apartment and a studio. And you never loved him? If that's true, is it supposed to make me feel better?"

"I told you," she said, her voice flattened with pain. "I told you you didn't want to know everything about me."

He couldn't stand to hear another word. He was exhausted and hungry and depleted, his mind a scorched pot whose contents had burned away to nothing. He almost didn't care whether there was anything between Klara and Novak still, whether their most recent break was decisive or just one of many temporary breaks. The idea that she'd been with that man, Zoltan Novak, with his odious moustache--that he'd put his hands on her body, on her birthmarks and scars, the terrain that had seemed to belong to Andras alone, but which of course belonged only to Klara, to do with as she wished--he couldn't stand it. And then there were the others--the dancer, the playwright--and before them there had undoubtedly been others still. They seemed to become real to him all at once, the legions of her former lovers, those men who had preceded him in his knowledge of her. They seemed to crowd the room. He could see them in their ridiculous ballet costumes and their expensive overcoats and their decorated military jackets, with their good haircuts and bad haircuts and dusty or glossy shoes, their proud or defeated-looking shoulders, their grace, their awkwardness, their variously shaped spectacles, their collective smell of leather and shaving soap and Macassar oil and plain masculine desire. Klara Morgenstern: That was what they had in common. Despite what Madame Gerard had told him, he had thought himself unique in her life, without precedent, but the truth was that he was a foot soldier in an army of lovers, and once he'd fallen there would be others to replace him, and others after that. It was too much. He pulled the quilt over his shoulder and put an arm across his eyes. She said his name again in her low familiar voice. He remained silent, and she said it again. He wouldn't make a sound. After a while he heard her get up and put on her coat, and then he heard the door open and close. On the other side of the wall a pair of new neighbors began to make noisy love. The woman called out in a breathy contralto; the man grunted in basso. Andras ground his face into pillow, wild with grief, thinking of nothing, wishing to God he were dead.

BY THE NEXT MORNING he was dizzy with fever. Heat poured out of him and soaked the bed; then he was shaking with chills beneath his blanket and his jacket and his overcoat and three wool sweaters. He couldn't eat, couldn't get up for work, couldn't go to school. When he got thirsty he drank the cold remains of tea straight from the kettle.

When he had to piss he used the chamber pot beneath the bed. On the morning of the second day, when Polaner came looking for him, he didn't have the strength to tell him to leave, though all he wanted was to be alone. Now it was Polaner who stepped into the role of nurse; he did it as though he'd done it all his life. He made Andras get out of bed and wash himself. He emptied the chamber pot, changed Andras's sheets. He boiled water and brewed strong tea; he sent the concierge for soup and made Andras eat it. When Andras was clean and dressed and lying exhausted on the freshly made bed, Polaner made him tell him exactly what had happened. He took it all in with careful attention, and judged the situation grave, though not hopeless. The important thing now, he said, was for Andras to get well. There were two projects to be finished for studio. If he couldn't get out of bed and get back to work, Polaner would suffer for it: They were team projects, and he and Andras were the team. Then there were exams to prepare for: statics and history of architecture. They would be given in ten days' time. If Andras failed, he would lose his scholarship and be sent home. There was also the small matter of Andras's job.