The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  CHAPTER FIVE

  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.

  At seven o'clock in the morning the Ecole Speciale was deserted. The studios were silent, the courtyard empty, the amphitheater an echoing void. He knew he could find a few students asleep at their desks if he looked, students who had stayed up all night drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and working on drawings or models. Sleepless nights were commonplace at the Ecole Speciale. There were rumors of pills that sharpened your mind and allowed you to stay up for days, for weeks. There were legends of artistic breakthroughs occurring after seventy-two waking hours. And there were tales of disastrous collapse. One studio was called l'atelier du suicide. The older students told the younger about a man who'd shot himself after his rival won the annual Prix du Amphitheatre. In that particular studio, on the wall beside the chalkboard, you could see a blasted-out hollow in the brick. When Andras had asked Vago about the suicide, Vago said that the story had been told when he was a student, too, and that no one could confirm it. But it served its purpose as a cautionary tale.

  A light was on in Vago's office; Andras could see the yellow square of it from the courtyard. He ran up the three flights and knocked. There was a long silence before Vago opened the door; he stood before Andras in his stocking feet, rubbing his eyes with an inky thumb and forefinger. His collar was open, his hair a wild tangle. "You," he said, in Hungarian. A small word, salted with a grain of affection. Te.

  "Me," Andras said. "Still here, for now."

  Vago ushered him into the office and motioned him to sit down on the usual stool.

  Then he left Andras alone for a few minutes, after which he returned looking as if he'd washed his face in hot water and scrubbed it with a rough towel. He smelled of the pumice soap that was good for getting ink off one's hands.

  "Well?" Vago said, and seated himself behind the desk.

  "Tibor sends his deepest thanks. He's applying for his visa now."

  "I've already written to Professor Turano."

  "Thank you," Andras said. "Truly."

  "And how are you?"

  "Not very well, as you can imagine."

  "Worried about how you're going to pay your tuition."

  "Wouldn't you be?"

  Vago pushed back his chair and went to look out the window. After a moment he turned back and put his hands through his hair. "Listen," he said. "I don't feel much like teaching you French this morning. Why don't we take a field trip instead? We've got a good hour and a half before studio."

  "You're the professor," Andras said.

  Vago took his coat from its wooden peg and put it on. He pushed Andras through the door ahead of him, followed him down the stairs, and steered him through the blue front doors of the school. Out on the boulevard he fished in his pocket for change; he led Andras down the stairs of the Raspail Metro just as a train flew into the station. They rode to Motte-Picquet and transferred to the 8, then changed again at Michel-Ange Molitor. Finally, at an obscure stop called Billancourt, Vago led Andras off the train and up on
to a suburban boulevard. The air was fresher here outside the city center; shopkeepers sprayed the sidewalks in preparation for the morning's business, and window-washers polished the avenue's glass storefronts. A line of girls in short black woolen coats stepped briskly along the sidewalk, led by a matron with a feather in her hat.

  "Not far now," Vago said. He led Andras down the boulevard and turned onto a smaller commercial street, then onto a long residential street, then onto a smaller residential street lined with gray duplexes and sturdy red-roofed houses, which yielded suddenly to a soaring white ship of an apartment building, triangular, built on a shard of land where two streets met at an acute angle. The apartments had porthole windows and deep-set balconies with sliding-glass doors, as if the building really were an ocean liner; it lanced forward through the morning behind a prow of curving windows and milk-white arcs of reinforced concrete.

  "Architect?" Vago said.

  "Pingusson." A few weeks earlier they had gone to see his work in the design pavilion at the International Exposition; the fifth-year student who had been their guide had declaimed about the simplicity of Pingusson's lines and his unconventional sense of proportion.

  "That's right," Vago said. "One of ours--an Ecole Speciale man. I met him at an architecture convention in Russia five years ago, and he's been a good friend ever since.

  He's written some sharp pieces for L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui. Pieces that got people to read the magazine when it was just getting off the ground. He's also a hell of a poker player. We've got a regular Saturday night game. Sometimes Professor Perret pays us a visit--he can't play worth a damn, but he likes to talk."

  "I can imagine that," Andras said.

  "Well, now, this Saturday night, guess what the talk was about?"

  Andras

  shrugged.

  "Not a guess?"

  "The Spanish Civil War."

  "No, my young friend. We talked about you. Your problem. The scholarship.

  Your lack of funds". Meanwhile, Perret kept pouring champagne. A first-rate '26 Canard-Duchene he received as a gift from a client. Now, Georges-Henri--that's Pingusson--he's an uncommonly intelligent man. He's responsible for a lot of very fine buildings here in Paris and has a houseful of awards to show for them. He's an engineer, too, you know, not just an architect. He plays poker like a man who knows numbers. But when he drinks champagne, he's all bravado and romance. Around midnight he threw his bankbook on the table and told Perret that if he, Perret, won the next hand, then he--Pingusson, I mean-

  -would pitch in for your tuition and fees.

  Andras stared at Vago. "What happened?"

  "Perret lost, of course. I don't think I've ever seen him beat Pingusson. But the champagne had already done its work. He's a smart one, our Perret. In the end, smarter than Pingusson."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Afterward, we're all standing on the street trying to get a cab. Perret's sober as an owl, shaking his head. 'Terrible shame about the Levi boy,' he says. 'Tragic thing.' And Georges-Henri, drunk on champagne--he practically goes to his knees on the sidewalk and begs Perret to let him stand you a loan. Fifty percent, he says, and not a centime less.

  'If the boy can come up with the other half,' he says, 'let him stay in school.'"

  "You can't be serious," Andras said.

  "I'm afraid so."

  "But he came to his senses the next morning."

  "No. Perret made him put it in writing that night. He owes Perret, in any case. The man's done him more than a few favors."

  "And what kind of security does he want for the loan?"

  "None," Vago said. "Perret told him you were a gentleman. And that you'd earn plenty once you graduated."

  "Fifty percent," Andras said. "Good God. From Pingusson." He looked up again at the curving profile of the building, its soaring white prow. "Tell me you're not joking."

  "I'm not joking. I've got the signed letter on my desk."

  "But that's thousands of francs."

  "Perret convinced him you were worth helping."

  He felt his throat closing. He was not going to cry, not here on a street corner at Boulogne-Billancourt. He scuffed the sole of his shoe against the sidewalk. There had to be a way to come up with the other half. If Perret had worked magic for him, if he had made something for him out of nothing, if he considered him a gentleman, the least Andras could do was to meet the challenge of Pingusson's loan. He would do whatever he had to do. How long had he spent looking for a job? A few days? Fourteen hours? The city of Paris was a vast place. He would find work. He had to.

  There were times when a good-natured ghost seemed to inhabit the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt, times when a play should have fallen apart but didn't. On the evening of Marcelle Gerard's debut as the Mother, all had seemed poised for disaster; an hour before curtain Marcelle appeared in Novak's office and threatened to quit. She wasn't ready to go on, she told him. She would embarrass herself in front of her public, the critics, the minister of culture. Novak took her hands and implored her to be reasonable. He knew she could perform the role. She had been flawless in the audition. The part had gone to Claudine Villareal-Bloch only because Novak hadn't wanted to show favoritism toward Madame Gerard. Their affair may have been long past now, but people still talked; he'd been afraid that word would get back to his wife at a time when things were already delicate between them. Marcelle understood that, of course; hadn't they discussed it when the decision had been made? He would never have considered allowing her to go on tonight if he didn't think she would be perfect. Her fears were normal, after all. Hadn't Sarah Bernhardt herself overcome a paralyzing bout of stage fright in her 1879 portrayal of Phedre? He knew without a doubt that as soon as Marcelle set foot onstage she would become Brecht's vision of the role. She must know it too. Didn't she? But when he'd finished, Madame Gerard had pulled her hands away and retired to her dressing room without a word, leaving Novak alone.

  Perhaps it was the earnest force of his worry that called Sarah Bernhardt's ghost out of the walls of the theater that night; perhaps it was the collective worry of the cast and crew, the lighting men, the ushers, the costumers, the janitors, the coat-check girl.

  Whatever the reason, by the time the nine o' clock hour struck, Marcelle Gerard's hesitation had vanished. The minister of culture sat in his box, tippling discreetly from a silver flask; Lady Mendl and the honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes were with him, Lady Mendl with peacock feathers in her hair, Daisy Fellowes resplendent in a Schiaparelli suit of jade-green silk. The war in Spain had made communist theater fashionable in France.

  The house was packed. The lights dimmed. And then Marcelle Gerard stepped onto the stage and spoke as if in the plum-toned voice of Sarah Bernhardt herself. From his place in the wings, Zoltan Novak watched as Madame Gerard called forth a rendition of The Mother that put Claudine Villareal-Bloch's love-addled performances to shame. He breathed a sigh of relief so pleasurable, so deep, he was glad his wife had denied him the chest-constricting comfort of his cigarettes. With any luck, he had left his consumption behind for good. The time he'd spent back home in Budapest at the medicinal baths had flushed the blood and pain from his lungs. The play had not failed. And his theater might survive after all--who knew--despite the long red columns in its ledger books and the debts that increased persistently each week.

  He found himself in such an expansive mood, once he'd received the praise of the minister of culture after the show and had passed his compliments along to the blushing, breathless Marcelle Gerard, that he accepted and drank two glasses of champagne, one after the other, there in the dressing-room hallway. Before he left, Marcelle called him into her inner sanctum and kissed him on the mouth, just once, almost chastely, as if everything were forgiven. At midnight he pushed through the stage door into a fine sharp mist. His wife would be waiting for him in the bedroom at home, her hair undone, her skin scented with lavender. But he hadn't moved three steps in her direction before someone rushed him from behind an
d grabbed his arm, making him drop his briefcase.

  There had been a spate of muggings outside the theater of late; he was generally cautious, but tonight the champagne had made him careless. Acting upon instincts he'd developed in the war, he swung around and struck his assailant in the stomach. A dark-haired young man fell gasping to the curb. Zoltan Novak stooped to pick up the briefcase, and it was only then that he heard what the boy was gasping. Novak-ur. Novak-ur. His own name, with its Hungarian honorific. The young man's face seemed vaguely familiar. Novak helped him to his feet and brushed some wet leaves from his sleeve. The young man touched his lower ribs gingerly.

  "What were you thinking, coming up behind someone like that?" Novak said in Hungarian, trying to get a better look at the boy's face.

  "You wouldn't see me in your office," the young man managed to say.

  "Should I have seen you?" Novak said. "Do I know you?"

  "Andras Levi," the young man gasped.

  Undrash Levi. The boy from the train. He remembered Andras's bewilderment in Vienna, his gratitude when Novak had bought him a pretzel. And now he'd punched the poor boy in the stomach. Novak shook his head and gave a low, rueful laugh. "Mr. Levi,"