The Invisible Bridge (8 page)

"Professor Turano sent a letter to the Jewish organization that provides your scholarship. He wanted to see if money could be found for Tibor, too. But his request was denied, with regrets. New restrictions have been imposed this week in Hungary: As of today, no organization can send money to Jewish students abroad. Your Hitkozseg's student-aid funds have been frozen by the government."

Andras blinked at him, trying to understand what he meant.

"It's not just a problem for Tibor," Vago continued, looking into Andras's eyes.

"It's also a problem for you. In short, your scholarship can no longer be paid. To be honest, my young friend, your scholarship has never been paid. Your first month's check never arrived, so I paid your fees out of my own pocket, thinking there must have been some temporary delay." He paused, glancing at Professor Perret, who was watching as Vago delivered the news in Hungarian. "Monsieur Perret doesn't know where the money came from, and need not know, so please don't betray surprise. I told him everything was fine. However, I'm not a rich man, and, though I wish I could, I can't pay your tuition and fees another month."

An ice floe ascended through Andras's chest, slow and cold. His tuition could no longer be paid. His tuition had never been paid. All at once he understood Perret's kindness and regret.

"We think you're a bright student," Perret said in French. "We don't want to lose you. Can your family help?"

"My family?" Andras's voice sounded thready and vague in the high-ceilinged room. He saw his father stacking oak planks in the lumberyard, his mother cooking potato paprikas at the stove in the outdoor kitchen. He thought of the pair of gray silk stockings, the ones he'd given her ten years earlier for Chanukah--how she'd folded them into a chaste square and stored them in their paper wrapping, and had worn them only to synagogue. "My family doesn't have that kind of money," he said.

"It's a terrible thing," Perret said. "I wish there were something we could do.

Before the depression we gave out a great many scholarships, but now ..." He looked out the window at the low clouds and stroked his military beard. "Your expenses are paid until the end of the month. We'll see what we can do before then, but I'm afraid I can't offer much hope."

Andras translated the words in his mind:
not much hope
.

"As for your brother," Vago said, "it's a damned shame. Turano wanted very much to help him."

He tried to shake himself from the shock that had come over him. It was important that they understand about Tibor, about the money. "It doesn't matter," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "The scholarship doesn't matter--for Tibor, I mean. He's been putting money away for six years. He's got to have enough for the train ticket and his first year's tuition. I'll cable him tonight. Can your friend's father hold the place for him?"

"I'd imagine so," Vago said. "I'll write to him at once, if you think it's possible.

But perhaps your brother can help you, too, if he's got some money put away."

Andras shook his head. "I can't tell him. He hasn't saved enough for both of us."

"I'm dreadfully sorry," Perret said again, coming forward to shake Andras's hand.

"Professor Vago tells me you're a resourceful young man. Perhaps you'll find a way through this. I'll see what I can do on our side."

This was the first time Perret had touched him. It was as though Andras had just been told he had a terminal disease, as though the shadow of impending death had allowed Perret to dispense with formalities. He clapped Andras on the back as he led him to the door of the office. "Courage," he said, giving Andras a salute, and turned him out into the hall.

Andras went down through the dusty yellow light of the staircase, past the classroom where his Gare d'Orsay drawing lay abandoned on the table, past the beautiful Lucia in the front office, and through the blue doors of the school he had come to think of as his own. He walked down the boulevard Raspail until he reached a post office, where he asked for a telegraph blank. On the narrow blue lines he wrote the message he'd composed on the way: POSITION SECURED FOR YOU AT MEDICAL COLLEGE M

ODENA, GRATIAS FRIEND OF V AGO. O BTAIN PASSPORT AND VISAS AT

ONCE. H URRAH! For a moment, in a fog of self-pity, he considered omitting the H

URRAH. But at the last moment he included it, paying the extra ten centimes, and then walked out onto the boulevard again. The cars continued to speed by, the afternoon light fell just as it always fell, the pedestrians on the street rushed by with their groceries and drawings and books, all the city insensible to what had just taken place in an office at the Ecole Speciale.

Unseeing, unthinking, he walked the narrow curve of the rue de Fleurus toward the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he found a green bench in the shade of a plane tree.

The bench was within sight of the bee farm, and Andras could see the hooded beekeeper checking the layers of a hive. The beekeeper's head and arms and legs were speckled with black bees. Slow-moving, torpid with smoke, they roamed the beekeeper's body like cows grazing a pasture. In school, Andras had learned that there were bees who could change their nature when conditions demanded it. When a queen bee died, another bee could become the queen; that bee would shed its former life, take on a new body, a different role. Now she would lay eggs and converse about the health of the hive with her attendants. He, Andras, had been born a Jew, and had carried the mantle of that identity for twenty-two years. At eight days old he'd been circumcised. In the schoolyard he'd withstood the taunts of Christian children, and in the classroom his teachers' disapproval when he'd had to miss school on Shabbos. On Yom Kippur he'd fasted; on Shabbos he'd gone to synagogue; at thirteen he'd read from the Torah and become a man, according to Jewish law. In Debrecen he went to the Jewish gimnazium, and after he graduated he'd taken a job at a Jewish magazine. He'd lived with Tibor in the Jewish Quarter of Budapest and had gone with him to the Dohany Street Synagogue. He'd met the ghost of Numerus Clausus, had left his home and his family to come to Paris. Even here there were men like Lemarque, and student groups that demonstrated against Jews, and more than a few anti-Semitic newspapers. And now he had this new weight to bear, this new tsuris. For a moment, as he sat on his bench at the Jardin du Luxembourg, he wondered what it would be like to leave his Jewish self behind, to shrug off the garment of his religion like a coat that had become too heavy in hot weather. He remembered standing in the Sainte-Chapelle in September, the holiness and the stillness of the place, the few lines he knew from the Latin mass drifting through his mind:
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison
.

Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy.

For a moment it seemed simple, clear: become a Christian, and not just a Christian--a Roman Catholic, like the Christians who'd imagined Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, the Matyas Templom and the Basilica of Szent Istvan in Budapest. Shed his former life, take on a new history. Receive what had been withheld from him. Receive mercy.

But when he thought of the word
mercy
, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind:
rachmones
, whose root was
rechem
, the Hebrew word for womb.
Rachmones:
a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child. He'd prayed for it every year at synagogue in Konyar on the eve of Yom Kippur. He had asked to be forgiven, had fasted, had come away at the end of Yom Kippur with a sense of having been scraped clean. Every year he'd felt the need to hold his soul to account, to forgive and be forgiven. Every year his brothers had flanked him in synagogue--Matyas small and fierce on his left, Tibor lean and deep-voiced on his right. Beside them was their father in his familiar tallis, and behind the women's partition, their mother--patient, forbearing, firm, her presence certain even when they could not see her. He could no sooner cease being Jewish than he could cease being a brother to his brothers, a son to his father and mother.

He stood, giving a last look to the beekeeper and his bees, and set off across the park toward home. He was thinking now not of what had happened but of what he was going to have to do next: find a job, a way of making the money it would take to stay in school. He wasn't French, of course, but that didn't matter; in Budapest, thousands of workers were paid under the table and no one was the wiser. Tomorrow was Saturday.

Offices would be closed, but shops and restaurants would be open--bakeries, groceries, bookshops, art-supply stores, brasseries, men's clothiers. If Tibor could work full-time in a shoe store and study his anatomy books at night, then Andras could work and go to school. By the time he had reached the rue des Ecoles, he was already framing the necessary phrase in his head: I'm looking for a job. In Hungarian, A
llast keresek
. In French,
Je cherche ...je cherche...
a job. He knew the word:
un boulot
.

Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt

THAT FALL the Sarah-Bernhardt was presenting
The Mother
, a new play by Bertolt Brecht, at nine o'clock every night but Monday. The theater was located at the direct center of the city, in the place du Chatelet. It offered five tiers of luxurious seating and the thrilling awareness that Miss Bernhardt's voice had filled
this space
, had caused
that chandelier
to shiver on its chain. Somewhere inside the theater was the cream-and-gilt-paneled dressing room with the gold bathtub in which the actress had reputedly bathed in champagne. On the first Saturday in November the cast had been called for an unscheduled rehearsal; Claudine Villareal-Bloch, the Mother of the title, had suffered an acute attack of vocal strain that everyone tacitly attributed to her new affair with a young Brazilian press attache. Into these vaguely embarrassing circumstances, Madame Villareal-Bloch's understudy had been called at the last moment to take over the part.

Marcelle Gerard paced her dressing room in a fury, wondering how Claudine Villareal-Bloch could have dared to spring this trick upon her; it seemed an intentional humiliation.

Madame Villareal-Bloch knew that Madame Gerard, chafed by her position as understudy, had failed to prepare. That very morning in rehearsal she'd forgotten her lines and had stammered in the most unprofessional manner. In his office down the hall, Zoltan Novak drank Scotch neat and wondered what would happen to him if the play could not go forward, if Marcelle Gerard froze onstage as she had at that morning's rehearsal. The minister of culture himself was scheduled to attend the following night's performance; that was how popular the new Brecht play had become, and how dire the current situation was. If public embarrassment resulted tomorrow night, the blame would fall to Novak, the Hungarian. Failure was not French.

Desperately, desperately, Zoltan Novak wanted to smoke. But he couldn't smoke.

The previous night, when he'd learned of Madame Villareal-Bloch's illness, his wife had hidden his cigarettes, knowing he might tend toward excess; she had made him swear not to buy more, and vowed that she would sniff his clothes for smoke. As he paced his office in a state of nicotine-deprived anxiety, the production assistant came in with a list of urgent messages. The properties manager was missing a set of workers' shovels from the third scene; should they do the scene without them, or buy new shovels? Madame Gerard's name had been misspelled in the program for tomorrow night (Guerard, a minor mistake), and did he want the whole lot reprinted? Finally, there was a boy downstairs looking for a job. He claimed to know Monsieur, or at least that was what he seemed to be saying--his French was imperfect. What was his name? Something foreign. Levi.

Undrash.

Buy new shovels for the workers. Leave the programs as they were--too expensive to reprint. And no, he didn't know a Levi Undrash. Even if he did, God help him, the last thing he had for anyone right now was a job.

Andras had planned to arrive at school on Monday morning with triumphant news for Professor Vago: He had found a job, had arranged to pay his tuition, and would therefore remain at school. Instead he found himself trudging down the boulevard Raspail in twig-kicking frustration. All weekend he had scoured the Latin Quarter in search of work; he had inquired at front doors and back doors, in bakeshops and garages; he had even dared to knock on the door of a graphic design shop where a young man sat working in his shirtsleeves at a drafting table. The man had stared at Andras with a kind of bemused contempt and told him to stop in again once he'd earned his degree. Andras had walked on, hungry and chilled by rain, refusing to capitulate. He had crossed the Seine in a fog, trying to imagine who he might call upon for help; when he looked up he saw that he'd walked all the way to the place du Chatelet. It occurred to him then that he might present himself at the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt and ask to see Zoltan Novak, who had, after all, invited Andras to stop by. He could go that very moment; it was half past seven, and Novak might be at the theater before the show. But at the Sarah-Bernhardt he'd been turned away--politely, regretfully, and with a great deal of rapid, sympathetic French--by a young man who claimed to have spoken directly to Novak, who hadn't recognized Andras's name. Andras had spent the rest of that evening and all the next day searching for work, but his luck hadn't improved. In the end he'd found himself back at home, sitting at the table by the window, holding a telegram from his brother.UNBELIEVABLE

NEWS! THANKS FOREVER TO YOU & VAGO. WILL APPLY STUDENT VISA TOMORROW. MODENA. HURRAH! TIBOR

He would have given anything to see Tibor, to tell him what had happened and hear what he thought Andras should do. But Tibor was twelve hundred kilometers away in Budapest. There was no way to ask or receive advice of that kind by telegram, and a letter would take far too long. He had, of course, told Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov at the student dining club that weekend; their anger on his behalf had been gratifying, their sympathy fortifying, but there was little they could do to help. In any case, they weren't his brother; they couldn't have Tibor's understanding of what the scholarship meant to him, nor what its loss would mean.