Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“It’s not architecture,” Andras said, and handed the cover back to Vago.

“You’ll learn architecture. And in the meantime you’ll study French. There’s no other way to survive here. I can help you, but I can’t translate for you in every class. So you will come here every morning, an hour before studio, and practice your French with me.”

“Here with you, sir?”

“Yes. From now on we will speak only French. I’ll teach you all I know. And for God’s sake, you will cease to call me ‘sir,’ as if I were an army officer.” His eyes assumed a serious expression, but he twisted his mouth to the left in a French-looking moue. “L’architecture n’est pas un jeu d’enfants,” he said in a deep, resonant voice that matched exactly, both in pitch and tone, the voice of Professor Perret. “L’architecture, c’est l’art le plus sériuex de tous.”

“L’art le plus sérieux de tous,” Andras repeated in the same deep tone.

“Non, non!” Vago cried. “Only I am permitted the voice of Monsieur le Directeur. You will please speak in the manner of Andras the lowly student. My name is Andras the Lowly Student,” Vago said in French. “If you please: repeat.”

“My name is Andras the Lowly Student.”

“I shall learn to speak perfect French from Monsieur Vago.”

“I shall learn to speak perfect French from Monsieur Vago.”

“I will repeat everything he says.”

“I will repeat everything he says.”

“Though not in the voice of Monsieur le Directeur.”

“Though not in the voice of Monsieur le Directeur.”

“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 Opéra-and cursing every stick and stone of it. After a while I transferred to the École Spéciale. 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 École Spéciale, distracting himself by repeating French architectural terms: toit, fenêtre, porte, mur, corniche, balcon, balustrade, souche de cheminée. 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 gimnázium. 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 Konyár and Debrecen -what he had studied, what his friends had been like, where he had lived, whom he’d loved. Andras told Vago about Éva Kereny, the girl who had kissed him in the garden of the Déri 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 Mátyás 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.