The Invisible Bridge (17 page)

The meeting hall was just around the corner from the palatial Beaux-Arts, a few blocks east of the Gare d'Orsay. Andras didn't ever want to see that building again. He knew that the critiques he'd received had been accurate; in his zeal to replicate each detail of the building he had failed to grasp its whole, to understand what made the design distinct and alive. This was a classic first-year mistake, Vago had told him on his way out. But if that were the case, why hadn't Vago cautioned him against it when he'd started? Rosen, too, now claimed a towering hatred for the subject of his model, the Ecole Militaire. They scowled at the sidewalk in companionate symmetry as they made their way down the rue de l'Universite.

Since the meeting they were attending was just a recruitment session, there was no need for secrecy or disguise; they arrived with the rest of the attendees, most of whom looked to be students. At a lectern on a low stage at the front of the room, a whip-thin man in an ill-fitting gray suit declared himself to be Monsieur Dupuis, "Secretary to President Pemjean himself," and clapped his hands for order. The gathering fell silent.

Volunteers walked along the aisles, handing out special supplementary sections of a newspaper entitled
Le Grand Occident
. The Secretary to President Pemjean Himself announced that this supplement set forth the beliefs of the organization, which the governing members would now read aloud to the assembly. A half-dozen grim-looking young fellows gathered on the stage, their copies of the supplement in hand. One by one they read that Jews must be removed from positions of influence in France, and that they should cease to exercise authority over Frenchmen; that Jewish organizations in France must be dissolved, because, while masquerading shamelessly as Jewish welfare agencies, they were working to achieve global domination; that the rights of French citizenship must be taken away from all Jews, who must henceforth be regarded as foreigners--even those whose families had been settled in France for generations; and that all Jewish goods and belongings should become the property of the state.

As each of the tenets was read, there were brief cracklings of applause. Some of the assembled men shouted their approval, and others raised their fists. Still others seemed to disagree, and a few began to argue with the supporters.

"What about the Jews whose brothers or fathers died for France in the Great War?" someone shouted from the balcony.

"Those Zionists died for their own glory, not for the glory of France," the Secretary to the President Himself called back. "Israelites can't be trusted to serve France.

They must be forbidden to bear arms."

"Why not let
them
die, if someone has to die?" another man called.

Rosen curled his hands around the back of the seat in front of him, his knuckles going white. Andras didn't know what he would do if Rosen started shouting.

"You're here because you believe in the need for a pure France, for the France our fathers and grandfathers built," the Secretary to the President continued. "You're here to lend your strength to the cleansing of France. If you're not here for that purpose, please depart. We need only the most patriotic, the most true-hearted among you." The Secretary waited. There was a quiet rumble among the assembly. One of the six young men who had read the tenets shouted,
"Vive la France!"

"You will become part of an international alliance--" the Secretary began, but his words disappeared under a sudden staccato din, a wooden clapclacking that rendered his words unintelligible. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the noise ceased. The Secretary cleared his throat, straightened his lapels, and began again. "You will become part--"

This time the noise was even louder than before. It came from every part of the hall. Certain members of the audience had gotten to their feet and were spinning wooden noisemakers on sticks. As before, after a few moments of loud hard clatter, they stopped.

"I welcome your enthusiasm, gentlemen," the Secretary continued. "But, if you please, wait until--"

The noise exploded again, and his time it did not cease. The men with noisemakers--there were perhaps twenty or thirty of them among the assembly--pushed into the aisles and spun their instruments as hard and as loud as they could. These were Purim noisemakers, Andras saw now--the wooden graggers used at synagogue during the reading of the story of Esther, whenever the villain Haman's name occurred in the text.

He glanced at Rosen, who had understood, too. The Secretary banged on his lectern. The six grim-faced men onstage stood at attention, as if awaiting an order from the Secretary.

More men pushed out of the rows and into the aisles, bearing large banners that they unrolled and held high so the audience could see them.
Ligue Internationale Contre
l'Antisemitisme
, read one.
Stop the French Hitlerians
, said another.
Liberte, Egalite,
Fraternite
, read a third. The men holding the banners sent up a cheer, and an angry roar burst from the audience. The thin Secretary to the President flushed a surprising purple.

Rosen let out a whoop and pulled Andras into the aisle, and the two of them helped to hoist one of the banners. One member of the Ligue, a tall broad-shouldered man in a tricolor neckerchief, produced a megaphone and began to shout, "Free men of France!

Don't let these bigots poison your minds!"

The Secretary growled an order at the six stern-faced young men, and in another moment all was chaos in the assembly hall. The seats emptied. Some audience members pulled at the banners, others pursued the men with the noisemakers. The six men who had read the beliefs of the organization went after the man with the megaphone, but other men defended him in a ring as he continued to urge
Fraternite! Egalite!
The Secretary disappeared behind a curtain at the back of the stage. Men shoved Andras from behind, kicked at his knees, elbowed him in the chest. Andras wouldn't let go of the banner. He raised the pole high and shouted
Stop the French Hitlerians
. Rosen was no longer at his side; Andras couldn't see him in the crowd. Someone tried to take the banner and Andras wrestled with the man; someone else grabbed him by the collar, and a blow caught him across the jaw. He stumbled against a column, spat blood onto the floor. All around him, men shouted and fought. He shoved his way toward an exit, feeling his teeth with his tongue and wondering if he'd have to see a dentist. In the vestibule he found Rosen grappling with a massive bald man in work overalls. As though he meant to fight Rosen himself, Andras caught him around the waist and wrenched him away, sending Rosen shoulder-first into a wall. The man in overalls, finding his arms empty, charged back into the fray of the auditorium. Andras and Rosen staggered out of the building, past streams of policemen who were rushing up the steps to break up the riot. When they'd gotten clear of the crowd, they tore down the rue de Solferino, all the way to the quai d'Orsay, where they cast themselves down on a pair of benches and lay panting.

"So we weren't the only ones!" Rosen said, touching his ribs with his fingertips.

Andras felt the inside of his lip with his tongue. His cheek still bled where his teeth had cut it, but the teeth were intact. At the sound of quick footsteps he looked up to see three members of the Ligue running down the street, their banners flapping. Other men chased them. Policemen chased the others.

"I'd love to see the look on that secretary's face again," Rosen said.

"You mean the Secretary to the President Himself?"

Rosen put his hands on his knees and laughed. But then an ambulance rushed down the street in the direction of the assembly hall, and a few moments later another followed. Not long afterward, more Ligue members passed; these looked pale and stricken, and they dragged their banners on the sidewalk and held their hats in their hands. Andras and Rosen watched them in silence. Something grave had happened: Someone from the Ligue had been hurt. Andras took off his own hat and held it on his lap, his adrenaline dissolving into hollow dread. Le Grand Occident wasn't the only group of its kind; there had to be dozens of similar meetings taking place all over Paris that very minute. And if meetings like that were taking place in Paris, then what was going on in the less enlightened cities of Europe? Andras pulled his jacket tighter around himself, beginning to feel the cold again. Rosen got to his feet; he, too, had become quiet and serious.

"Far worse things are going to happen here," he said. "Wait and see."

On the rue de Sevigne the next day, Madame Morgenstern and Elisabet sat in silence as Andras described the incidents of the past forty-eight hours. He told them about the critique, and how far his work had fallen in his own estimation; he told them what had happened at the meeting. He produced a clipping from that morning's
L'Oeuvre
and read it aloud. The article described the disrupted recruitment session and the melee that followed. Each group blamed the other for initiating the violence: Pemjean took the opportunity to point out the deviousness and belligerence of the Jewish people, and Gerard Lecache, president of the Ligue Internationale Contre l'Antisemitisme, called the incident a manifestation of Le Grand Occident's violent intent. The newspaper abandoned all pretense of journalistic objectivity to praise the Maccabean bravery of the Ligue, and to accuse Le Grand Occident of bigotry, ignorance, and barbarism; two members of the Ligue, it turned out, had been beaten senseless and were now hospitalized at the Hotel-Dieu.

"You might have been killed!" Elisabet said. Her tone was acidic as usual, but for an instant she gave him a look of what seemed like genuine concern. "What were you thinking? Did you imagine you'd take on all those brutes at once? Thirty of you against two hundred of them?"

"We weren't part of the plan," Andras said. "We didn't know the LICA was going to be there. When they started making noise, we joined in."

"Ridiculous

fools,

all

of you," Elisabet said.

Madame Morgenstern fixed her gray eyes upon Andras. "Take care you don't get in trouble with the police," she said. "Remember, you're a guest in France. You don't want to be deported because of an incident like this."

"They wouldn't deport me," Andras said. "Not for serving the ideals of France."

"They certainly would," Madame Morgenstern said. "And that would be the end of your studies. Whatever you do, you must protect your status here. Your presence in France is a political statement to begin with."

"He'll never last here, anyway," Elisabet said, the moment of concern having passed. "He'll fail out of school by the end of the year. His professors think he's talentless. Weren't you listening?" She peeled herself from the velvet chair and slouched off to her bedroom, where they could hear her knocking around as she got ready to go out. A few moments later she emerged in an olive-green dress and a black wool cap.

She'd braided her hair and scrubbed her cheeks into a windy redness. Pocketbook in one hand, gloves in the other, she stood in the sitting-room doorway and gave a half wave.

"Don't wait up for me," she told her mother. Then, as an apparent afterthought, she arrowed a look of disdain in Andras's direction. "There's no need to come next weekend, Champion of France," she said. "I'll be skiing with Marthe in Chamonix. In fact, I wish you'd desist altogether." She slung her bag over her shoulder and ran down the stairs, and they heard the door slam and jingle behind her.

Madame Morgenstern lowered her forehead into her hand. "How much longer will she be like this, do you think? You weren't like this when you were sixteen, were you?"

"Worse," Andras said, and smiled. "But I didn't live at home, so my mother was spared."

"I've threatened to send her to boarding school, but she knows I don't have the heart. Nor the money, for that matter."

"Well," he said. "Chamonix. How long will she be there?"

"Ten days," she said. "The longest she's been gone from home."

"Then I suppose it'll be January before I see you again," Andras said. He heard himself say it aloud--
maga
, the singular Hungarian
you
--but by that time it was too late, and in any case Madame Morgenstern hadn't seemed to notice the slip. With the excuse that it was time for him to go to work, he got up to take his coat and hat from the rack at the top of the stairs. But she stopped him with a hand on his sleeve.

"You're forgetting the Spectacle d'Hiver," she said. "You'll come, won't you?"

Her students' winter recital. He knew it was next week, of course. It was to take place at the Sarah-Bernhardt on Thursday evening; he was the one who had designed the posters. But he hadn't expected to have any excuse to attend. He wasn't scheduled to work that night, since
The Mother
would already have closed for the holidays. Now Madame Morgenstern was looking at him in quiet anticipation, her hand burning through the fabric of his coat. His mouth was a desert, his hands glacial with sweat. He told himself that the invitation meant nothing, that it fell perfectly within the bounds of their acquaintance: as a friend of the family, as a possible suitor of Elisabet, he might well be asked to come. He mustered a response in the affirmative, saying he'd be honored, and they executed their weekly parting ritual: the coat-rack, his things, the stairs, a chaste goodbye. But at the threshold she held his gaze a moment longer than usual. Her eyebrows came together, and she held her mouth in its pensive pose. Just as she seemed about to speak, a pair of red-jacketed schoolgirls ran down the sidewalk chasing a little white dog, and they had to move apart, and the moment passed. She raised a hand in farewell and stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

THAT YEAR, in her studio on the rue de Sevigne, Claire Morgenstern had taught some ninety-five girls between the ages of eight and fourteen, three of the oldest of whom would soon depart for professional training with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. She had been preparing the children for the Spectacle d'Hiver for two months now; the costumes were ready, the young dancers schooled in the ways of snowflakes, sugarplums, and swans, the winter-garden scenery in readiness. That week Andras's advertising poster appeared all over town: a snowflake child in silhouette against a starry winter sky, one leg extended in an arabesque, the words
Spectacle d'Hiver
trailing the upraised right hand like a comet tail. Every time he saw it--on the way to school, on the wall opposite the Blue Dove, at the bakery--he heard Madame Morgenstern saying
You'll come, won't you?