Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

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 Gérard’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 Gérard stepped onto the stage and spoke as if in the plum-toned voice of Sarah Bernhardt herself. From his place in the wings, Zoltán Novak watched as Madame Gérard 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 Gérard, 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 and 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. Zoltán Novak stooped to pick up the briefcase, and it was only then that he heard what the boy was gasping. Novak-úr. Novak-úr. 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 Lévi,” the young man gasped.

Undrash Lévi. 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. Lévi,” he said. “My deepest apologies.”

“Thanks ever so much,” the young man said bitterly, still nursing his rib.

“I knocked you clear into the gutter,” Novak said in dismay.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Why don’t you walk with me awhile? I don’t live far from here.”

So they walked together and Andras told him the whole story, beginning with how he’d gotten the scholarship and lost it, and finishing with the offer from Pingusson. That was what had brought him back here. He had to try to see Novak again. He was willing to perform the meanest of jobs. He would do anything. He would black the actors’ shoes or sweep the floors or empty the ash cans. He had to start earning his fifty percent. The first payment was due in three weeks.

By that time, they’d reached Novak’s building in the rue de Sèvres. Upstairs, light radiated from behind the scrim of the bedroom curtains. The falling mist had dampened Novak’s hair and beaded on the sleeves of his overcoat; beside him, Lévi shivered in a thin jacket. Novak found himself thinking of the ledger he’d closed just before he’d gone up to see the show. There, in the accountant’s neat red lettering, were the figures that attested to the Sarah-Bernhardt’s dire state; another few losing weeks and they would have to close. On the other hand, with Marcelle Gérard in the role of the Mother, who knew what might happen? He knew what was going on in Eastern Europe, that the drying up of Andras’s funds was only a symptom of a more serious disease. In Hungary, in his youth, he’d seen brilliant Jewish boys defeated by the numerus clausus; it seemed a crime that this young man should have to bend, too, after having come all this way. The Bernhardt was not a philanthropic organization, but the boy wasn’t asking for a handout. He was looking for work. He was willing to do anything. Surely it would be in the spirit of Brecht’s play to give work to someone who wanted it. And hadn’t Sarah Bernhardt been Jewish, after all? Her mother had been a Dutch-Jewish courtesan, and of course Judaism was matrilineal. He knew. Though he had been baptized in the Catholic church and sent to Catholic schools, his own mother had been Jewish, too.

“All right, young Lévi,” he said, laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Why don’t you come by the theater tomorrow afternoon?”

And Andras turned such a brilliant and grateful smile upon him that Novak felt a fleeting shock of fear. Such trust. Such hope. What the world would do to a boy like Andras Lévi, Novak didn’t want to know.

THE MOTHER had twenty-seven actors: nine women, eighteen men. They worked six days a week, and in that time they performed seven shows. Backstage they had few moments to spare and an astonishing number of needs. Their costumes had to be mended and pressed, their lapdogs walked, their letters posted, their voices soothed with tea, their dinners ordered. Occasionally they needed the services of a dentist or a doctor. They had to run lines and take quick restorative naps. They had to cultivate their offstage romances. Two of the men were in love with two of the women, and the two beloved women each loved the wrong man. Notes flew between the enamored parties. Flowers were sent, received, destroyed; chocolates were sent and consumed.

Into this mayhem Andras descended ready to work, and the assistant stage manager set him to it at once. If Monsieur Hammond broke a shoelace, Andras was to find him another. If the bichon frisé who belonged to Madame Pillol needed to be fed, Andras was to feed him. Notes had to be transmitted between the director and the principals, between the stage manager and the assistant stage manager, between the offstage lovers. When the displaced Claudine Villareal-Bloch arrived at the theater to demand her role back, she had to be appeased with praise. (The fact was, the assistant stage manager told Andras, Villareal-Bloch had been dismissed for good; Marcelle Gérard was making a killing in the role. The Bernhardt was selling out its seats every night for the first time in five years.) It was unclear to Andras how anything had been accomplished backstage at the Sarah-Bernhardt before he was hired. By the time the performance began on his first day of work, he was too exhausted even to watch from the wings. He fell asleep on a sofa he didn’t know was needed for the second act, and was jostled awake when two stagehands hoisted it to move it onstage. He scrambled off just as the actors were leaving the stage after the first act, and found himself the recipient of countless requests for aid.