Страница 58 из 172
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 a
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 cha
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 Île 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. My feelings for you are unchanged, but I ca
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 Sévigné 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.
By the evening service he was scraped out and numb and dizzy from fasting. He knew he was sliding toward some abyss, and that he was powerless to stop himself. At last the service concluded with the piercing spiral of the shofar blast. He and Polaner were supposed to go to di
“I heard the most remarkable thing about you,” he said. “My friend Paul told me you’re involved with the mother of that tall girl, his obstreperous Elisabet.”
Andras shook his head. “Not anymore,” he said. And he took a bottle of whiskey from the table and locked himself in József’s bedroom, where he got blind drunk, shouted curses at himself in the mirror, terrified pedestrians by leaning out over the balcony edge, vomited into the fireplace, and finally passed into unconsciousness on the floor.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. Café Bédouin
JUDAISM OFFERED no shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn, no injunction against shaving or listening to music or going to work. He couldn’t live in his torn clothes, couldn’t spend his days sitting in ashes. Nor could he turn to more secular modes of comfort; he couldn’t afford to drink himself into oblivion every night or suffer a nervous collapse. After he had scraped himself off József’s parquet floor and crawled back to his own apartment, he concluded that he had reached the nadir of his grief. The thought itself was medicinal. If this was the lowest point, then things would have to improve. He had made the break with Klara. Now he had to go on without her. Classes would soon begin again at the École Spéciale; he couldn’t fail his second year of school on her account. Nor could he justify hanging himself or leaping from a bridge or otherwise indulging in Greek tragedy. He had to go about the business of his life. He thought these things as he stood at the window of his garret, looking down into the rue des Écoles, still nursing a wild and irrepressible hope that she’d come around the corner in her red hat, half ru