The Invisible Bridge (33 page)

"Well, that's that!" Forestier said, his broad shoulders curling. "The last democracy of Central Europe kneels to Hitler at the urging of Britain and France. These are terrible times, my young Mr. Levi, terrible times."

Andras had assumed then that the crisis was over, that a war had been averted, even if at a cruel price. But he arrived at Forestier's on the twenty-third of September to learn that the meeting in Bad Godesberg had yielded more demands still: Hitler wanted his troops to occupy the Sudetenland, and he required the Czech population of the area to vacate their homes and farms within a week, leaving behind everything they owned.

Chamberlain brought home the new list of demands, which were promptly rejected by both the French and British governments. A military occupation was unthinkable, akin to surrendering the rest of Czechoslovakia without a fight.

The dreaded call-up has come
, Andras had written to Tibor that morning, the eve of Rosh Hashanah.
The Czech military has been mobilized, and our Premier Daladier
has ordered a partial mobilization of French troops as well
. Andras had watched it happen that morning: All over town, reservists left their shops and taxicabs and cafe tables and headed for points outside Paris where they would meet their battalions. When he went to send the letter to Tibor, there had been a crush at the postbox; every departing soldier seemed to have a missive to mail. Now he sat on his bed with his tallis bag in hand, waiting for Eli Polaner and thinking of his parents and his brothers and Klara and the prospect of war. At half past six Polaner arrived; they took the Metro to Le Peletier in the Ninth, and walked two blocks to the Synagogue de la Victoire.

This synagogue was not at all like the ornate Moroccan-style temple of Dohany utca, where Andras and Tibor had gone for High Holiday services in Budapest. Nor was it like the one-room shul in Konyar with its dark paneling and its wooden screen dividing the men's section from the women's. The Synagogue de la Victoire was a soaring Romanesque building of pale gold stone, with a grand rose window crowning the arched facade. Inside, slender columns rose toward a barrel-vaulted ceiling; a high clerestory deluged the space with light. Above the Byzantine-ornamented bimah, an inscription implored TU AIMERAS L'ETERNEL TON DIEU DE TOUT TON COEUR. By the time Andras and Polaner arrived, the service had already begun. They took seats in a pew near the back and unbuttoned their velvet tallis bags: Polaner's tallis was of yellowed silk with blue stripes, Andras's of fine-spun white wool. Together they said the blessing for donning the prayer shawls; together they draped the shawls over their shoulders. The cantor sang in Hebrew,
How good and sweet it is when brothers sit down together
. Again and again the familiar melody: one line low and somber like a work chant, the next climbing up into the arch of the ceiling like a question: Isn't it good for brothers to sit down together? Polaner had learned the melody in Krakow. Andras had learned it in Konyar. The cantor had learned it from his grandfather in Minsk. The three old men standing beside Polaner had learned it in Gdynia and Amsterdam and Prague. It had come from somewhere. It had escaped pogroms in Odessa and Oradea, had found its way to this synagogue, would find its way to others that had not yet been built.

For Andras, who had spent the past four weeks constructing a wall around the part of himself that concerned Klara Morgenstern, the melody had the effect of an earthquake.

It began as a small tremor, just enough to make the wall tremble--yes, it was good when brothers sat down together, but it had been months, months, since he'd seen his own brothers--and then there was a jolt of unbearable homesickness for Konyar, and a second jolt of homesickness for the rue de Sevigne and for the deeper, more intimate home that was Klara herself. For the past four weeks he had immersed himself in the news of the world and turned his thoughts away from her; late at night, when it was no use to pretend that he had really put her out of his mind, he told himself that her silence alone could not be taken to mean that all was over. Though she hadn't contacted him, she hadn't sent back his letters or requested that he return the things she kept at his apartment, either. She hadn't given him reason to abandon hope altogether. But now, as the population of Paris fled to the countryside in anticipation of a bombardment, as the abstract possibility of war became a real and tangible thing, what was he supposed to make of her continued silence? Would she leave Paris without letting him know? Would she leave under the protection of Zoltan Novak, in a private car he had sent for her? At that very moment was she packing the same suitcase Andras had unpacked for her a few weeks earlier?

He pulled his tallis closer and tried to still his thoughts; there was some relief in repeating the prayers, some comfort in Polaner's presence and the presence of these other men and women who knew the words by heart. He said the prayer that listed the sins committed by the House of Israel, and the one in which he asked the Lord to keep his mouth from evil and his lips from speaking guile. He said the prayer of gratitude for the Torah, and listened to others sing the words written in the white-clad scrolls. And at the end of the service he prayed to be written into the Book of Life, as if there might still be a place in such a book for him.

After the service, he and Polaner walked across the river to the students' dining club, which had emptied over the summer, filled again as the schools prepared to reopen, and then emptied again with the threat of war. The server loaded Andras's plate with bread and beef and hard oily potatoes.

"At home, my mother would be serving brisket and chicken noodle soup," Polaner said as they took their plates to a table. "She would never let potatoes like these enter her kitchen."

"You can't blame the potato," Andras said. "It's hardly the potato's fault."

"It always begins with the potato," Polaner said, raising an eyebrow darkly.

Andras had to laugh. It seemed a miracle that Polaner could be sitting across the table from him after what had happened last January. Though much was wrong with the world, it could not be denied that Eli Polaner had recovered from his injuries and had been brave enough to return to the Ecole Speciale for a second year.

"Your mother must have hated to let you leave Krakow," Andras said.

Polaner unfolded his napkin and arranged it on his lap. "She's never glad to see me go," he said. "She's my mother."

Andras looked at him carefully. "You never told your parents what happened, did you?"

"Did you think I would?"

"You nearly died, after all."

"They'd never have let me come back," Polaner said. "They'd have shipped me off to some Freudian sanatorium for a talking cure, and you'd be lonely tonight,
copain."

"Lucky for me, then, that you didn't tell," Andras said. He had missed his friends, and Polaner in particular. He had imagined that by now they would all be dining at this club again, that soon they would be together in the studio, that they'd be meeting after classes at the Blue Dove to drink black tea and eat almond biscuits. He'd imagined himself narrating their exploits to Klara, making her laugh as they sat by the fire on the rue de Sevigne. But Rosen and Ben Yakov were home with their families, and he and Polaner were here alone together, and the Ecole Speciale had suspended the beginning of classes, as had all the other colleges of Paris. And he wasn't narrating anything to Klara at all.

As the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur began to unfold, he told himself he would likely hear from her soon. War seemed inevitable. At night there were practice blackouts; the few corner lamps that remained lit were covered with black paper hoods to cast their light downward. Departing families clotted the trains and raised a cacophony of car horns in the streets. Five hundred thousand more men were called to the colors. Those who stayed in Paris rushed to buy gas masks and canned food and flour. A telegram arrived from Andras's parents: IF WAR DECLARED COME

HOME FIRST AVAIL TRAIN. He sat on his bed with the telegram in his hands, wondering if this were the end of everything: his studies, his life in Paris, all of it. It was the twenty-eighth of September, three days before Hitler's threatened occupation of the Sudetenland. In seventy-two hours his life might fall apart. It was impossible to wait any longer. He would go to the rue de Sevigne at once and demand to see Klara; he would insist that she let him escort her and Elisabet out of the city as soon as they could pack their bags. Before he could lose his nerve, he threw on a jacket and ran all the way to her house.

But when he reached the door, he found his way barricaded by Mrs. Apfel.

Madame Morgenstern would see no one, she said. Not even him. And she had no plans to leave the city, as far as Mrs. Apfel knew. At the moment she was in bed with a headache and had asked particularly that she not be disturbed. In any case, hadn't Andras heard?

There was to be a meeting at Munich the next day, a final effort to negotiate peace. Mrs.

Apfel was certain those idiots would come to their senses. He would see, she said; there wouldn't be a war after all.

Andras hadn't heard. He ran to Forestier's and spent the next two days with his ear sewn to the wireless. And on the thirtieth of September it was announced that Hitler had reached an accord with France, Britain, and Italy: Germany would have the Sudetenland in ten days' time. There would, after all, be a military occupation. The Sudeten Czechs would be required to leave their homes and shops and farms without taking a stick of furniture, a single bolt of cloth or ear of corn, and there was to be no program of compensation for the lost goods. In the regions occupied by Polish and Hungarian minorities, popular votes would determine new frontiers; Poland and Hungary would almost certainly reclaim those lost territories. The radio announcer read the agreement in quick grainy French, and Andras struggled to make sense of it. How was it possible that Britain and France had accepted a plan almost identical to the one they'd rejected out of hand a few days earlier? The radio station broadcast the noise of celebration from London; Andras could hear the local jubilation well enough just outside Forestier's studio, where hundreds of Parisians cheered the peace, celebrating Daladier, praising Chamberlain. The men who had been called up could now come home. That was an unarguable good--so many written into the Book of Life for another year. Why, then, did he feel more as Forestier seemed to feel--Forestier, who sat in the corner with his elbows on his knees, his forehead hammocked in his hands? The recent series of events seemed clothed in disgrace. Andras felt the way he might have if, after the attack on Polaner, Professor Perret had preserved peace at the Ecole Speciale by expelling the victim.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, Andras and Polaner went to hear Kol Nidre at the Synagogue de la Victoire. With solemn ceremony, with forehead-scraping genuflections, the cantor and the rabbi prayed for
rachmones
upon the congregation and the House of Israel. They declared that the congregants were released from the vows they'd made that year, to God and to each other. They thanked the Almighty that Europe had avoided war.

Andras gave his thanks with a lingering sense of dread, and as the service progressed, his unhappiness flowed into another channel. That week, the threat of war had once again proved an effective distraction from the situation with Klara. For a time he had fooled himself, had let himself believe that her month of silence might contain a tacit promise, a suggestion that she was still wrestling with the problem that had sent them home early from Nice. But he couldn't deceive himself any longer. She didn't want to see him. They were finished; that was clear. Her silence could not be read otherwise.

That night he went home and put her things into a wooden crate: her comb and brush, two chemises, a stray earring in the shape of a daffodil, a green glass pillbox, a book of Hungarian short stories, a book of sixteenth-century French verse from which she liked to read aloud to him. He lingered for a moment over the book; he'd bought it for her because it contained the Marot poem about the fire that dwelt secretly in snow. He turned to the poem now. Carefully, with his pocketknife, he cut the page from the book and put it into the envelope that contained her letters. Those he kept, because he couldn't bear to part with them. He wrote her a note on a postcard he'd bought as a keepsake months earlier: a photograph of the Square Barye, the tiny park at the eastern tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, where he'd spoken the Marot poem into her ear on New Year's Day.
Dear Klara
, he wrote,
here are a few things you left with me. Myfeelings for you are unchanged, but I
cannot continue to wait without knowing the reason for your silence, or whether it will be
broken. So I must make the break myself. I release you from your promises to me. You
need not be faithful to me any longer, nor conduct yourself as if you might someday be
my wife. I have released you, but I cannot release myself from what I vowed to you; you
must do that, Klara, if that is what you want. In the meantime, should you choose to come
to me again, you will find that I am still, as ever, your ANDRAS.

He nailed the top onto the crate and hefted it. It weighed almost nothing, those last vestiges of Klara in his life. In the dark he went to her house one last time and set the box on the doorstep, where she would find it in the morning.

The next day he prayed and fasted. During the early service he felt certain he had made a terrible mistake. If he'd waited another week, he thought, she might have come back to him; now he had secured his own unhappiness. He wanted to run from the synagogue to the rue de Sevigne and retrieve the box before anyone found it. But as the fast scoured him from the inside, he began to believe that he'd done the right thing, that he'd done what he had to do to save himself. He pulled his tallis around his shoulders and leaned into the repetition of the eighteen benedictions. The familiar progression of the prayer brought him greater certainty. Nature had its cycles; there was a time for all things, and all things passed away.