The Invisible Bridge (7 page)

"Let me ask you a question," Vago said in Hungarian now, his expression earnest.

"Have I done the right thing by bringing you here? Are you terribly lonely? Is this all overwhelming?"

"It

is
overwhelming," Andras said. "But I find I'm strangely happy."

"I was miserable when I first got here," Vago said, settling back in his chair. "I came three weeks after I finished school in Rome, and started at the Beaux-Arts. That school was no place for a person of my temperament. Those first few months were awful!

I hated Paris with a passion." He looked out the office window at the chill gray afternoon.

"I walked around every day, taking it all in--the Bastille and the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, Notre-Dame, the Opera--and cursing every stick and stone of it. After a while I transferred to the Ecole Speciale. That was when I began to fall in love with Paris.

Now I can't imagine living anyplace else. After a time, you'll feel that way too."

"I'm beginning to feel that way already."

"Just wait," Vago said, and grinned. "It only gets worse."

In the mornings he bought his bread at the small boulangerie near his building, and his newspaper from a stand on the corner; when he dropped his coins into the proprietor's hand, the man would sing a throaty
Merci
. Back at his apartment he would eat his croissant and drink sweet tea from the empty jam jar. He would look at the photographs in the paper and try to follow the news of the Spanish Civil War, in which the
Front Populaire
was losing ground now against the
Nationalistes
. He wouldn't allow himself to buy a Hungarian expatriate paper to fill in the blanks; the urgency of the news itself eased the effort of translation. Every day came stories of new atrocities: teenaged boys shot in ditches, elderly gentlemen bayoneted in olive orchards, villages firebombed from the air. Italy accused France of violating its own arms embargo; large shipments of Soviet munitions were reaching the Republican army. On the other side, Germany had increased the numbers of its Condor Legion to ten thousand men. Andras read the news with increasing despair, jealous at times of the young men who had run away to fight for the Republican army. Everyone was involved now, he knew; any other view was denial.

With his mind full of horrific images of the Spanish front, he would walk the leaf-littered sidewalks toward the Ecole Speciale, distracting himself by repeating French architectural terms:
toit, fenetre, porte, mur, corniche, balcon, balustrade, souche de
cheminee
. At school he learned the difference between stereobate and stylobate, base and entablature; he learned which of his professors secretly preferred the decorative to the practical, and which were adherents to Perret's cult of reinforced concrete. With his statics class he visited the Sainte-Chapelle, where he learned how thirteenth-century engineers had discovered a way to strengthen the building using iron struts and metal supports; the supports were hidden within the framework of the stained-glass windows that spanned the height of the chapel. As morning light fell in red and blue strands through the glass, he stood at the center of the nave and experienced a kind of holy exaltation. No matter that this was a Catholic church, that its windows depicted Christ and a host of saints. What he felt had less to do with religion than with a sense of harmonious design, the perfect meeting of form and function in that structure. One long vertical space meant to suggest a path to God, or toward a deeper knowledge of the mysteries. Architects had done this, hundreds of years ago.

Pierre Vago, true to his word, tutored Andras every morning for an hour. The French he'd learned at school returned with speed, and within a month he had absorbed far more than he'd ever learned from his master at gimnazium. By mid-October the lessons were nothing more than long conversations; Vago had a talent for finding the subjects that would make Andras talk. He asked Andras about his years in Konyar and Debrecen--what he had studied, what his friends had been like, where he had lived, whom he'd loved. Andras told Vago about Eva Kereny, the girl who had kissed him in the garden of the Deri Museum in Debrecen and then spurned him coldheartedly; he told the story of his mother's only pair of silk stockings, a Chanukah gift bought with money Andras had earned by taking on his fellow students' drawing assignments. (The brothers had all been competing to get her the best gift; she'd reacted with such childlike joy when she'd seen the stockings that no one could dispute Andras's victory. Later that night, Tibor sat on Andras in the yard and mashed his face into the frozen ground, exacting an older brother's revenge.) Vago, who had no siblings of his own, seemed to like hearing about Matyas and Tibor; he made Andras recite their histories and translate their letters into French. In particular he took an interest in Tibor's desire to study medicine in Italy.

He had known a young man in Rome whose father had been a professor of medicine at the school in Modena; he would write a few letters, he said, and would see what could be done.

Andras didn't think much about it when he said it; he knew Vago was busy, and that the international post traveled slowly, and that the gentleman in Rome might not share Vago's ideas about educating young Hungarian-Jewish men. But one morning Vago met Andras with a letter in hand: He had received word that Professor Turano might be able to arrange for Tibor to matriculate in January.

"My God!" Andras said. "That's miraculous! How did you do it?"

"I correctly estimated the value of my connections," Vago said, and smiled.

"I've got to wire Tibor right away. Where do I go to send a telegram?"

Vago put up a hand in caution. "I wouldn't send word just yet," he said. "It's still just a possibility. We wouldn't want to raise his hopes in vain."

"What are the chances, do you think? What does the professor say?"

"He says he'll have to petition the admissions board. It's a special case."

"You'll tell me as soon as you hear from him?"

"Of course," Vago said.

But he had to share the preliminary good news with someone, so he told Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov that night at their student dining club on the rue des Ecoles. It was the same club Jozsef had recommended when Andras had arrived. For 125 francs a week they received daily dinners that relied heavily upon potatoes and beans and cabbage; they ate in an echoing underground cavern at long tables inscribed with thousands of students' names. Andras delivered the news about Tibor in his Hungarian-accented French, struggling to be heard above the din. The others raised their glasses and wished Tibor luck.

"What a delicious irony," Rosen said, once they'd drained their glasses. "Because he's a Jew, he has to leave a constitutional monarchy to study medicine in a fascist dictatorship. At least he doesn't have to join us in this fine democracy, where intelligent young men practice the right of free speech with such abandon." He cut his eyes at Polaner, who looked down at his neat white hands.

"What's that about?" Ben Yakov said.

"Nothing,"

Polaner

said.

"What happened?" asked Ben Yakov, who could not stand to be left out of gossip.

"I'll tell you what happened," Rosen said. "On the way to school yesterday, Polaner's portfolio handle broke. We had to stop and fix it with a bit of twine. We were late to morning lecture, as you'll recall--that was us, coming in at half past ten. We had to sit in the back, next to that second-year, Lemarque--that blond bastard, the snide one from studio. Tell them, Polaner, what he said when we slid into the row."

Polaner laid his spoon beside the soup bowl. "What you
thought
he said."

"He

said

filthy Jews
. I heard it, plain as day."

Ben Yakov looked at Polaner. "Is that true?"

"I don't know," Polaner said. "He said something, but I didn't hear what."

"We both heard it. Everyone around us did."

"You're paranoid," Polaner said, the delicate skin around his eyes flushing red.

"People turned around because we were late, not because he'd called us filthy Jews."

"Maybe it's all right where you come from, but it's not all right here," Rosen said.

"I'm not going to talk about it."

"Anyway, what can you do?" said Ben Yakov. "Certain people will always be idiots."

"Teach him a lesson," Rosen said. "That's what."

"No," Polaner said. "I don't want trouble over something that may or may not have happened. I just want to keep my head down. I want to study and get my degree. Do you understand?"

Andras did. He remembered that feeling from primary school in Konyar, the desire to become invisible. But he hadn't anticipated that he or any of his Jewish classmates would feel it in Paris. "I understand," he said. "Still, Lemarque shouldn't feel"-

-he struggled to find the French words--"like he can
get away
with saying a thing like that. If he did say it, that is."

"Levi knows what I mean," Rosen said. But then he lowered his chin onto his hand and stared into his soup bowl. "On the other hand, I'm not at all sure what we're supposed to do about it. If we told someone, it would be our word against Lemarque's.

And he's got a lot of friends among the fourth- and fifth-years."

Polaner pushed his bowl away. "I have to get back to the studio. I've got a whole night's worth of work to do."

"Come on, Eli," Rosen said. "Don't be angry."

"I'm not angry. I just don't want trouble, that's all." Polaner put on his hat and slung his scarf around his neck, and they watched him make his way through the maze of tables, his shoulders curled beneath the worn velvet of his jacket.

"You believe me, don't you?" Rosen said to Andras. "I know what I heard."

"I believe you. But I agree there's nothing we can do about it."

"Weren't we talking about your brother a moment ago?" Ben Yakov said. "I liked that line of conversation better."

"That's right," Rosen said. "I changed the subject, and look what happened."

Andras shrugged. "According to Vago, it's too early to celebrate anyway. It may not happen after all."

"But it may," Rosen said.

"Yes. And then, as you pointed out, he'll go live in a fascist dictatorship. So it's hard to know what to hope for. Every scenario is complicated."

"Palestine," Rosen said. "A Jewish state. That's what we can hope for. I hope your brother does get to study in Italy under Mussolini. Let him take his medical degree under Il Duce's nose. Meanwhile you and Polaner and Ben Yakov and I will get ours in architecture here in Paris. And then we'll all emigrate. Agreed?"

"I'm not a Zionist," Andras said. "Hungary's my home."

"Not at the moment, though, is it?" Rosen said. And Andras found it impossible to argue with that.

For the next two weeks he waited for news from Modena. In statics he calculated the distribution of weight along the curved underside of the Pont au Double, hoping to find some distraction in the symmetry of equations; in drawing class he made a scaled rendering of the facade of the Gare d'Orsay, gratefully losing himself in measurements of its intricate clock faces and its line of arched doorways. In studio he kept an eye on Lemarque, who could often be seen casting inscrutable looks at Polaner, but who said nothing that could have been construed as a slur. Every morning in Vago's office he eyed the letters on the desk, looking for one that bore an Italian postmark; day after day the letter failed to arrive.

Then one afternoon as Andras was sitting in studio, erasing feathery pencil marks from his drawing of the d'Orsay, beautiful Lucia from the front office came to the classroom with a folded note in her hand. She gave the note to the fifth-year monitor who was overseeing that session, and left without a look at any of the other students.

"Levi," said the monitor, a stern-eyed man with hair like an explosion of blond chaff. "You're wanted at the private office of Le Colonel."

All talk in the room ceased. Pencils hung midair in students' hands. Le Colonel was the school's nickname for Auguste Perret. All eyes turned toward Andras; Lemarque shot him a thin half smile. Andras swept his pencils into his bag, wondering what Perret could want with him. It occurred to him that Perret might be involved with Tibor's chances in Italy; perhaps Vago had enlisted his help. Maybe he'd exerted some kind of influence with friends abroad, and now he was going to be the one to deliver the news.

Andras ran up the two flights of stairs to the corridor that housed the professors'

private offices, and paused outside Perret's closed door. From inside he could hear Perret and Vago speaking in lowered voices. He knocked. Vago called for him to enter, and he opened the door. Inside, standing in a shaft of light near one of the long windows that overlooked the boulevard Raspail, was Professor Perret in his shirtsleeves. Vago leaned against Perret's desk, a telegram in his hand.

"Good afternoon, Andras," Perret said, turning from the window. He motioned for Andras to sit in a low leather chair beside the desk. Andras sat, letting his schoolbag slide to the floor. The air in Perret's office was close and still. Unlike Vago's office, with its profusion of drawings on the walls and its junk sculptures and its worktable overflowing with projects, Perret's was all order and austerity. Three pencils lay parallel on the Morocco-topped desk; wooden shelves held neatly rolled plans; a crisp white model of the Theatre des Champs-Elysees stood in a glass box on a console table.

Perret cleared his throat and began. "We've had some disturbing news from Hungary. Rather disturbing indeed. It may be easier if Professor Vago explains it to you in Hungarian. Though I hear your French has advanced considerably." The martial tone had dropped from his voice, and he gave Andras such a kind and regretful look that Andras's hands went cold.

"It's rather complicated," Vago said, speaking in Hungarian. "Let me try to explain. I received word from my friend's father, the professor. A place came through for your brother at the medical college in Modena."

Vago paused. Andras held his breath and waited for him to go on.