The Invisible Bridge (16 page)

"No, come with us!" Madame Gerard said. "We're taking a cab. We'll drop you at home."

It was cold and growing dark, but Andras couldn't bear the thought of a ride on the crowded Metro with Elisabet and Marthe and Madame Morgenstern. Nor did he want to crowd into a cab with Madame Gerard and the others. He wanted to be alone, to find his way back to his own neighborhood, to lock himself into his room.

"I think I'll walk," he told them.

"But you'll come again for lunch next Sunday," Madame Morgenstern said, looking up at him from under the brim of her hat, her skin still illuminated with the rush of skating. "In fact, we're hoping you'll make a habit of it."

How else could he have replied? "Yes, yes, I'll come," he said.

AND SO A NDRAS became a fixture at Sunday lunches on the rue de Sevigne.

Quickly they established a pattern: Andras would come and exchange pleasantries with Madame Morgenstern; Elisabet would sit and scowl at Andras, or make fun of his clothes or his accent; when she failed to whip him up as she'd done at the first lunch, she'd grow bored and go out with Marthe, who had cultivated her own towering scorn for Andras.

Once Elisabet had gone he would sit with Madame Morgenstern and listen to records on the phonograph, or look at art magazines and picture postcards, or read from a book of poetry to practice his French, or talk about his family, his childhood. At times he tried to bring up the subject of her own past--the brother whom she hadn't seen in years, the shadowy events that had resulted in Elisabet's birth and had brought Madame Morgenstern to Paris. But she always managed to evade that line of conversation, turning his careful questions aside like the hands of unwelcome dance partners. And if he blushed when she sat close beside him, or stammered as he tried to respond after she'd paid him a compliment, she gave no sign that she'd noticed.

Before long he knew the precise shape of her fingernails, the cut and fabric of every one of her winter dresses, the pattern of lace at the edges of her pocket handkerchiefs. He knew that she liked pepper on her eggs, that she couldn't tolerate milk, that the heel of the bread was her favorite part. He knew she'd been to Brussels and to Florence (though not with whom); he knew that the bones of her right foot ached when the weather was wet. Her moods were changeable, but she tempered the darker ones by making jokes at her own expense, and playing silly American tunes on the phonograph, and showing Andras droll photos of her youngest students in their dance exhibition costumes. He knew that her favorite ballet was
Apollo
, and that her least favorite was
La
Sylphide
, because it was over-danced and so rarely done with originality. He considered himself shamefully ignorant on the subject of dance, but Madame Morgenstern seemed not to care; she would play ballets on the phonograph and describe what would be happening onstage as the music crested and ebbed, and sometimes she rolled up the sitting-room rug and reproduced the choreography for him in miniature, her skin flushing with pleasure as she danced. In return he would take her on walks around the Marais, narrating the architectural history of the buildings among which she made her life: the sixteenth-century Hotel Carnavalet, with its bas-reliefs of the Four Seasons; the Hotel Amelot de Bisseuil, whose great medusa-headed carriage doors had once opened regularly for Beaumarchais; the Guimard Synagogue on the rue Pavee, with its undulating facade like an open Torah scroll. She wondered aloud how she'd never taken note of those things before. He had pulled away a veil for her, she said, revealed a dimension of her quartier that she would never have discovered otherwise.

Despite the reassurance of the standing invitation, he lived in the fear that one Sunday he'd arrive at Madame Morgenstern's to find another man at the table, some mustachioed captain or tweed-vested doctor or talented Muscovite choreographer--some cultivated forty-year-old with a cultural fluency that Andras could never match, and a knowledge of the things that gentlemen were supposed to know: wines, music, ways to make a woman laugh. But the terrifying rival never appeared, at least not on Sunday afternoons; that fraction of the Morgenstern week seemed to belong to Andras alone.

Outside the household on the rue de Sevigne, life went on as usual--or what had come to seem usual, within the context of his life as a student of architecture in Paris. His model progressed toward completion, its walls already cut from the stiff white pasteboard and ready for assembly. Despite the fact that it was now as large as an overcoat box, he'd begun carrying the model to and from school each day. This was due to a recent spate of vandalism, directed only, it seemed, at the Jewish students of the Ecole Speciale. A third-year student named Jean Isenberg had had a set of elaborate blueprints flooded with ink; a fourth-year, Anne-Laure Bauer, had been robbed of her expensive statics textbooks the week before an exam. Andras and his friends had so far escaped unscathed, but Rosen believed it was only a matter of time before one of them became a target. The professors called a general assembly and spoke sternly to the students, promising severe consequences for the perpetrators and imploring anyone with evidence to come forth, but no one volunteered any information. At the Blue Dove, Rosen advanced his own theory.

Several students were known to belong to the Front de la Jeunesse and a group called Le Grand Occident, whose professed nationalism was a thin cover for anti-Semitism.

"That weasel Lemarque is a Jeunesse stooge," Rosen said over his almond biscuits and coffee. "I'd bet he's behind this."

"It can't be Lemarque," Polaner said.

"Why

not?"

Polaner flushed slightly, folding his slim white hands in his lap. "He helped me with a project."

"He did, did he?" Rosen said. "Well, I think you'd better watch your back. That little
salopard
would just as soon slit your throat as bid you bonjour."

"You won't make friends by setting yourself against everyone," said the politic Ben Yakov, whose chief preoccupation seemed to be to get as many people as possible to admire him, both male and female.

"Who cares?" said Rosen. "This isn't a tea party we're talking about."

Andras quietly agreed with Rosen. He'd had his misgivings about Lemarque ever since the ambiguous incident with Polaner at the beginning of the year. He'd watched Lemarque after that, and had found it impossible to ignore the way Lemarque looked at Polaner, as if there were something compelling and repellent about him at once, or as if his disgust with Polaner gave him a kind of pleasure. Lemarque had a way of sidling up to Polaner, of finding excuses to talk to him in class: Could he borrow Polaner's pantograph? Could he see Polaner's solution to this difficult statics problem? Was this Polaner's scarf that he'd found in the courtyard? Polaner seemed unwilling to consider that Lemarque could have anything but friendly motives. But Andras didn't trust Lemarque, nor the slit-eyed students who sat with him at the student cantina, smoking a German brand of cigarettes and wearing buttoned-up shirts and surplus military jackets, as if they wanted to be ready to fight if called upon. Unlike the other students, they kept their hair clipped close and their boots polished. Andras had heard some people refer to them disparagingly as
la garde
. And then there were the ones who wore subtler signs of their politics: the ones who seemed to look directly through Andras and Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov, though they passed each other in the halls or in the courtyard every day.

"What we need to do is infiltrate those groups," Rosen said. "The Front de la Jeunesse. The Grand Occident. Go to their meetings, learn what they're planning."

"That's brilliant," Ben Yakov said. "They'll find us out and break our necks."

"What do you think they're planning, anyway?" Polaner said, beginning to grow angry. "It's not as though they're going to mount a pogrom in Paris."

"Why not?" Rosen said. "Do you think they haven't considered it?"

"Can we talk about something else, please?" Ben Yakov said.

Rosen pushed his coffee cup away. "Oh, yes," he said. "Why don't you tell us about your latest conquest? What could possibly be more important or more urgent?"

Ben Yakov laughed off Rosen's slight, which infuriated Rosen all the more. He stood and threw money on the table, then slung his coat over his shoulder and made for the exit. Andras grabbed his own hat and followed; he hated to see a friend leave in anger. He caught up with Rosen on the corner of Saint-Germain and Saint-Jacques, and they stood together on the corner and waited for the light to change.

"You don't think I'm speaking nonsense, do you?" Rosen said, his hands deep in his pockets, his eyes fixed on Andras.

"No," Andras began, trying to find the words in French for what he wanted to say.

"You're just trying to think a few chess moves ahead."

"Oh," said Rosen, brightening. "Are you a chess player?"

"My brothers and I used to play. I wasn't very good. My older brother mastered a book of defenses by a Russian champion. I couldn't do a thing against him."

"Couldn't you read the book yourself?" Rosen said, and grinned.

"Maybe if he hadn't hidden it so well!"

"I suppose that's all I'm doing, then. Trying to find the book."

"You won't have to look very hard," Andras said. "There are posters for those Front de la Jeunesse meetings all over the Latin Quarter."

They had reached the Petit Pont at the foot of rue Saint-Jacques, and they crossed it together in the twilight. The towers of Notre-Dame caught the last rays of the setting sun as they entered the Square Charlemagne and walked toward the cathedral. They stopped to look at the grim saints who flanked the portals, one of whom held his own severed head in his hand.

"Do you know what I want to do when I grow up?" Rosen said.

"No," Andras said. "What?"

"Move to Palestine. Build a temple of Jerusalem stone." He paused and looked at Andras as if daring him to laugh, but Andras wasn't laughing. He was thinking of some photographs of Jerusalem that had been printed in
Past and Future
. The buildings had a kind of geologic permanence, as if they hadn't been made by human hands at all. Even in the black-and-white photos their stones seemed to radiate gold light.

"I want to make a city in the desert," Rosen said. "A new city where an old one used to be. In the shape of the ancient city, but composed of all-knew buildings. Perret's reinforced concrete is perfect for Palestine. Cheap and light, cool in the heat, ready to take on any shape." He seemed to be seeing it in the distance as he spoke, a city in the rippling dunes.

"So you're a dreamer," Andras said. "I never would have guessed."

Rosen smirked and said, "Don't let the others know." They looked up again at the tops of the towers as the line of gold narrowed to a filament. "You'll do it, won't you?" he said. "Come to one of these Jeunesse meetings? Then we'll see what they're plotting."

Andras hesitated. He tried to imagine what Madame Morgenstern might think of an act like that, an infiltration. He envisioned narrating it to her on one of their Sunday afternoons: his daring, his bravery. His foolishness? "And what if someone does recognize us?" he said.

"They won't," Rosen said. "They won't be looking for us among them."

"When do they meet?"

"That's my good man, Levi," Rosen said.

They decided to infiltrate a recruitment session for Le Grand Occident, reasoning that the meeting would be full of unfamiliar faces. It was to take place that Saturday at an assembly hall on rue de l'Universite in Saint-Germain. But first there were the end-of-term critiques to get through. Andras had finished his Gare d'Orsay at last, staying up two nights straight to do it; on Friday morning it stood white and inviolate on its pasteboard base. He knew it was good work, the product of long study, of many hours of painstaking measurement and construction. Rosen and Ben Yakov and Polaner had put in their time, too, and there on the studio tables stood their ghost-white versions of the Ecole Militaire, the Rotonde de la Villette, and the Theatre de l'Odeon. They were to be evaluated in turn by their peers, by their second- and third- and fourth-year superiors, by their fifth-year studio monitor, Medard, and finally by Vago himself. Andras thought himself seasoned by the relentless friendly criticism of his editor at
Past and Future;
he'd had some critiques earlier that fall, none of them as bad as what his editor had regularly delivered.

But when the critique of his d'Orsay began, the commentary took a savage turn almost at once. His lines were imprecise, his methods of construction amateurish; he had made no attempt whatever to replicate the building's front expanse of glass or to capture what was most striking about the design--the way the Seine, which flowed in front of the station, threw light against its high reflective facade. He'd made a dead model, one fourth-year student said. A shoebox. A coffin. Even Vago, who knew better than anyone how hard Andras had worked, criticized the model's lifelessness. In his paint-flecked work shirt and an incongruously fine vest, he stood over the model and gazed at it with undisguised disappointment. He drew a mechanical pencil from his pocket and tapped its metal end against his lip.

"A dutiful reproduction," he said. "Like a Chopin polonaise played at a student recital. You've hit all the notes, to be sure, but you've done so entirely without artistry."

And that was all. He turned away and moved on to the next model, and Andras fell into an oubliette of humiliation and misery. Vago was right: He had replicated the building without inspiration; how had he ever seen the model otherwise? It was little consolation that the other first-year students fared just as badly. He couldn't believe how confident he'd been half an hour earlier, how certain that everyone in the room would proclaim his work evidence of what a fine architect he would turn out to be.

He knew that the school had a tradition of difficult end-of-term critiques, that few first-year students survived with pride intact. It was the school's version of an initiation ritual, an annealing that prepared the students for the deeper and more subtle humiliations that would occur when the work under discussion was of their own design. But this critique had been much harsher than he'd imagined--and, what was worse, the comments had seemed justified. He'd worked as hard as he could and it hadn't been enough, not nearly, not by miles. And his humiliation was linked, in a way he found it impossible to articulate, to the idea of Madame Morgenstern and his relation to her--as though by building a fine replica of the Gare d'Orsay he might have had greater claim upon her affections. Now he couldn't give her an honest account of the day's events without revealing himself to be a prideful fool. He left the Ecole Speciale in a vile mood, a mood tenacious enough to stay with him through the night and the next morning; it was still with him when he went to meet Rosen for their infiltration.