Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

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 Écoles, he was already framing the necessary phrase in his head: I’m looking for a job. In Hungarian, Állást keresek. In French, Je cherche…je cherche… a job. He knew the word: un boulot.

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 Châtelet. 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 attaché. Into these vaguely embarrassing circumstances, Madame Villareal-Bloch’s understudy had been called at the last moment to take over the part. Marcelle Gérard 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 Gérard, 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, Zoltán Novak drank Scotch neat and wondered what would happen to him if the play could not go forward, if Marcelle Gérard 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, Zoltán 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 Gérard’s name had been misspelled in the program for tomorrow night (Guérard, 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. Lévi. Undrash.

Buy new shovels for the workers. Leave the programs as they were-too expensive to reprint. And no, he didn’t know a Lévi 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 Châtelet. It occurred to him then that he might present himself at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt and ask to see Zoltán 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.

U NBELIEVABLE NEWS! T HANKS FOREVER TO YOU & V AGO. W ILL APPLY STUDENT VISA TOMORROW. M ODENA. H URRAH! T IBOR

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 École Spéciale 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 École Spéciale. 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 Amphithéâtre. 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.