The Invisible Bridge (44 page)

Debate raged in the halls of the Ecole Speciale. Rosen wasn't the only one who believed that Europe was certain to go to war. Ben Yakov wasn't the only one who argued that war might still be averted. Everyone had an opinion. Andras held with Rosen-

-he couldn't see any other way out of the web into which Europe had fallen. As he and Polaner bent over their plans, he found himself thinking of his father's stories of the Great War--the stench and the bloodshed of combat, the nightmare of planes that rained bullets and fire upon the foot soldiers, the confusion and hunger and filth of the trenches, the surprise of escaping with one's own life. If there were a war, he would fight. Not for his own country; Hungary would fight alongside Germany, its ally, who had given it not only Ruthenia but also the Upper Province, which it had lost at Trianon. No: If there were a war, Andras would join the Foreign Legion and fight for France. He imagined appearing before Klara in the full glory of a dress uniform, a sword at his waist, the buttons of his coat polished to a painful sheen. She would beg him not to go to war, and he would insist that he must go--that he must protect the ideals of France, the city of Paris, and Klara herself within it.

But in May, two unexpected events served to blot out his awareness of the approaching conflict. The first was a tragedy: Ben Yakov's bride lost the baby she'd been carrying for five months. It was Klara who went to tend her at Ben Yakov's apartment, Klara who sent for the doctor when she found Ilana bleeding and wild with fever. At the hospital, in a long linoleum-tiled corridor decorated with lithographs of French doctors, Klara and Andras waited with Ben Yakov while a surgeon emptied Ilana's womb. Ben Yakov sat in stunned silence, still wearing his pajama shirt. Andras knew he believed this to be his fault. He hadn't wanted the child. He'd confessed it just a week earlier, late at night in the studio, as they sat working on a problem set for their statics class. "I'm not equal to it," he'd said, laying his six-sided pencil on the lip of the desk. "I can't be a father. I can't support a child. There's no money. And the world's falling apart. What if I have to go off and fight a war?"

Andras had thought then of Klara's womb, that sacred inward space they'd taken pains to keep empty. He'd had to force himself to make an empathetic reply. What he'd wanted to ask was why Ben Yakov had married Ilana di Sabato if he hadn't wanted a child. Now the subject seemed to hover in the antiseptic air of the corridor: Ben Yakov had wished the child gone, and it was gone.

Outside the hospital windows, the eastern margin of the sky had turned blue with the coming morning. Klara was exhausted, Andras knew: Her spine, usually held so straight, had begun to droop with fatigue. He told her to go home, promised he'd come to see her after they talked to the doctor. He insisted: She had a class to teach that morning at nine. She protested, saying she was willing to stay as long as it took, but in the end he persuaded her to go home and sleep. She said goodbye to Ben Yakov, and he thanked her for having known what to do. They both watched her walk off down the hall, her shoes ticking out their quiet rhythm against the linoleum.

"She knows," Ben Yakov said, once Klara had disappeared around the corner.

"Knows

what?"

"She knows how I felt about the baby."

"What makes you say that?"

"She would hardly look at me."

"You're imagining things," Andras said. "I know she thinks well of you."

"Well, she shouldn't." He pressed his fingers against his temples.

"It's not your fault," Andras said. "No one thinks it is."

"What if I think it is?"

"It's still not."

"What

if

she
thinks it is? Ilana, I mean?"

"It's still not. And anyway, she won't think so."

After the doctor had finished, a pair of orderlies wheeled Ilana out on a gurney and brought her to a ward, where they transferred her to a hospital bed. Andras and Ben Yakov stood beside the bed and watched her sleep. Her skin was wax-white from the loss of blood, her dark hair pushed back from her forehead.

"I think I'm going to faint," Ben Yakov said.

"You'd better sit down," Andras said. "Do you want some water?"

"I don't want to sit down. I've been sitting for hours."

"Take a walk, then. Get some air."

"I'm hardly dressed for it."

"Go ahead. It'll do you good."

"All right. You'll stay here with her?"

He promised he wouldn't move.

"I'll just be a minute," Ben Yakov said. He tucked his pajama shirt into his trousers, then went off down the long avenue of beds. Just as he disappeared through the door of the ward, Ilana gave a rising cry of pain and shifted her hips beneath the sheet.

Andras glanced around for a nurse. Three beds away, a silver-haired woman in a crisp cap ministered to another deathly pale girl.
"S'il vous plait,"
Andras called.

The nurse came to examine Ilana. She took her pulse and glanced at the chart at the end of the bed. "One moment," she said, and ran down the ward; she returned a minute later with a syringe and a vial. Ilana opened her eyes and looked around in a daze of pain. She seemed to be searching for something. When her gaze fell upon Andras, her focus sharpened and her forehead relaxed. A faint flush came to her lips.

"It's you," she said in Italian. "You came all the way from Modena."

"It's Andras," he told her. "You're going to be all right."

The nurse uncovered Ilana's shoulder and swabbed it with alcohol. "I'm giving her morphine for the pain," she said. "She'll feel better in a moment."

Ilana drew a sharp breath as the needle went in. "Tibor," she said, turning her eyes again toward Andras. Then the morphine found its mark, and her eyelids fluttered and closed.

"Go home, now," the nurse said. "We'll take care of your wife. She needs to rest.

You can visit her this afternoon."

"She's not my wife," Andras said. "She's a friend. I told her husband I'd stay with her until he got back."

The nurse raised an eyebrow, as if something weren't quite right about Andras's story, and went back to her patient down the ward.

Through the windows the sky continued its slow bleed toward blue. The quiet of the ward seemed to deepen as he looked at Ilana, her chest rising and falling beneath the sheet. The drug had enclosed her within a transparent capsule of sleep, like the princess in the fairy tale, Hofeherke--in French it must be Blanche-Neige--the exiled princess sleeping in her glass coffin on a hill, while those little men, the
torpek
, watched over her.

He thought again of the Marot poem he'd cut from Klara's book.
If fire dwells secretly in
snow, how can I escape burning?
He was glad Ben Yakov hadn't been there when Ilana had spoken, glad he hadn't seen her lips flush with color when she'd thought it was Tibor watching over the bed.

Ben Yakov returned forty minutes later, redolent of new-mown grass; the back of his pajama shirt was damp with dew. He took off his cap and smoothed his hair.

"How is she?"

"Fine," Andras said. "The nurse gave her a shot of morphine."

"Go on home, now," Ben Yakov said. "I'll stay with her until she wakes up."

"We're both supposed to leave. The nurse says she has to rest. We can come back this afternoon."

Ben Yakov didn't protest. He touched Ilana's pale forehead and let Andras lead him from the ward. All the way back to the Latin Quarter they walked in silence, their hands stuffed into their pockets. It seemed a particularly cruel morning to have lost a child, Andras thought: A loamy damp scent arose from the window boxes, from the new flowerbeds in the park; the branches of the chestnuts were crowded with small wet leaves. He walked Ben Yakov to the door of his apartment building and they faced each other on the sidewalk.

"You're a good friend," Ben Yakov said.

Andras shrugged and looked at the pavement. "I didn't do anything."

"Of course you did. You and Klara, both."

"You would have done the same for us."

"I'm not much good as a friend," Ben Yakov said. "Still worse as a husband."

"Don't say that."

"People like me shouldn't be allowed to marry." Even after a night at the hospital and an hour's sleep on a bench, he was elegant in his angular, cinematic way. But he twisted his mouth into a grimace of self-disgust. "I'm neglectful," he said. "And, to be honest, unfaithful."

Andras kicked at the boot scraper beside the entryway. He didn't want to hear anything more about it. He wanted to turn and walk home to the rue des Ecoles, climb into bed and sleep. But he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard what Ben Yakov had just said.

"Unfaithful," he said. "When?"

"Always. Whenever she'll see me. It's Lucia, of course. From school." Ben Yakov's voice had fallen to a half whisper. "I've never been able to break it off. Even this morning she came out and sat in the park with me while you watched over my wife. I'm in love, I think, or something horrible like that. I have been ever since I met her."

Andras felt a surge of indignation on behalf of the girl in the hospital bed. "If you were in love with her, why did you bring Ilana here?"

"I thought she might cure me," Ben Yakov said. "When I met her in Florence, she made me forget Lucia. She delighted me. And, though it's shameful to say, her innocence was arousing. She made me think I could be a different person, and for a time I was." He lowered his eyes. "I was excited about the prospect of marrying her. I knew I couldn't have married Lucia. She doesn't want to marry, for one thing. She wants to be an architect and travel the world. For another thing, she's--
une negresse
. My parents, you know. I couldn't."

Andras thought of the classmate who'd been attacked in the graveyard, the man from Cote d'Ivoire. That style of bigotry was supposed to belong to the other side. But it didn't, of course. Hadn't he himself been terrified to speak to Lucia because of her race, and, at the same time, inexplicably excited by her? What if he had fallen in love with her?

Could he have married her? Could he have brought her to his parents? He took Ben Yakov's shoulder in his hand. "I'm sorry," he said. "Truly."

"It's my own fault," Ben Yakov said. "I should never have married Ilana."

"You ought to get some sleep now," Andras said. "You'll need to go back to see her this afternoon."

A flint spark of fear burned for an instant in Ben Yakov's eyes. Andras recognized the expression; he'd seen it countless times on his younger brother's face at bedtime, just before Andras snuffed the candle. It was the panic of a child afraid to be left alone in the dark. Countless times, Andras had lain down beside Matyas and listened to him breathing until he fell asleep. But they were adults, he and Ben Yakov; the comfort they could ask of each other was finite. Ben Yakov repeated his thanks and turned away to unlock the door.

The second thing that happened that month--the second thing important enough to turn Andras's attention away from the increasingly grim headlines--was that the architecture contest came to a close. After a week of sleepless nights during which he experienced nausea, hallucinations, and the vertiginous thrill of last-minute inspiration, he and Polaner found themselves in the crowded amphitheater, waiting to defend their project before the judging panel. Professor Vago had invited Monsieur Lemain to lead the trio of judges. The other two, whose identities had been kept secret until the day of the prize critique, turned out to be none other than Le Corbusier and Georges-Henri Pingusson. Le Corbusier was dressed as if he had come directly from a construction site; his plaster-whitened trousers and sweat-stained workshirt seemed a silent reproach to Lemain in his impeccable black suit, and to Pingusson in his pearl-gray pinstriped jacket.

Perret, presiding over the contest, had waxed his moustache to crisp points and put on his most dramatic military cape. The judges walked a slow circuit of the room, examining the models on their display tables and the plans posted on corkboards around the periphery of the amphitheater, and the students followed in a respectful cluster.

Before long, it became clear that a profound difference of opinion existed between Le Corbusier and Pingusson. Everything one said, the other denounced as pure foolishness. At one point Le Corbusier went so far as to poke Pingusson in the chest with his pencil; Pingusson responded by shouting directly into Le Corbusier's reddened face.

The issue at hand was a pair of Dianalike caryatids, the entryway ornamentation of a sports club for women designed by a pair of fourth-year women. Le Corbusier declared the caryatids neoclassicist kitsch. Pingusson said he found them perfectly elegant.

"Elegant!" Le Corbusier spat. "Perhaps you would have said the same of Speer's monstrosity at the International Exposition! Plenty of hack neoclassicism in evidence there."

"I beg your pardon," Pingsson said. "Are you suggesting we forget the Greeks and Romans entirely, simply because the Nazis have appropriated them? Bastardized them, I might say?"

"Everything must be taken in context," Le Corbusier said. "At the present political moment, this choice seems indefensible. Though perhaps we're to give the young women a pass because, after all, they're
just women."
Those were the words he punctuated with a pair of jabs to Pingusson's chest.

"Rubbish!" Pingusson shouted. "How dare you accuse me of chauvinism? When you dismiss this choice as kitsch, are you not entirely disregarding the tradition of feminine power in classical mythology?"

"A fine point," Lemain said. "And since you're both so enlightened, gentlemen, why not let the women defend the choice themselves?"

The taller of the student architects--Marie-Laure was her name--began to explain in a neat, clipped French that these were no ordinary caryatids; they were modeled after Suzanne Lenglen, the recently deceased French tennis champion. She went on to defend other features of the design, but Andras lost the thread of the argument. He and Polaner would be critiqued next, and he was too nervous to concentrate on anything but that.