Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

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 Sévigné, 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 École Spéciale. 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.