Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“They won’t,” Rosen said. “They won’t be looking for us among them.”

“When do they meet?”

“That’s my good man, Lévi,” Rosen said.

They decided to infiltrate a recruitment session for Le Grand Occident, reasoning that the meeting would be full of unfamiliar faces. It was to take place that Saturday at an assembly hall on rue de l’Université in Saint-Germain. But first there were the end-of-term critiques to get through. Andras had finished his Gare d’Orsay at last, staying up two nights straight to do it; on Friday morning it stood white and inviolate on its pasteboard base. He knew it was good work, the product of long study, of many hours of painstaking measurement and construction. Rosen and Ben Yakov and Polaner had put in their time, too, and there on the studio tables stood their ghost-white versions of the École Militaire, the Rotonde de la Villette, and the Théâtre de l’Odeon. They were to be evaluated in turn by their peers, by their second- and third- and fourth-year superiors, by their fifth-year studio monitor, Médard, and finally by Vago himself. Andras thought himself seasoned by the relentless friendly criticism of his editor at Past and Future; he’d had some critiques earlier that fall, none of them as bad as what his editor had regularly delivered.

But when the critique of his d’Orsay began, the commentary took a savage turn almost at once. His lines were imprecise, his methods of construction amateurish; he had made no attempt whatever to replicate the building’s front expanse of glass or to capture what was most striking about the design-the way the Seine, which flowed in front of the station, threw light against its high reflective façade. He’d made a dead model, one fourth-year student said. A shoebox. A coffin. Even Vago, who knew better than anyone how hard Andras had worked, criticized the model’s lifelessness. In his paint-flecked work shirt and an incongruously fine vest, he stood over the model and gazed at it with undisguised disappointment. He drew a mechanical pencil from his pocket and tapped its metal end against his lip.

“A dutiful reproduction,” he said. “Like a Chopin polonaise played at a student recital. You’ve hit all the notes, to be sure, but you’ve done so entirely without artistry.”

And that was all. He turned away and moved on to the next model, and Andras fell into an oubliette of humiliation and misery. Vago was right: He had replicated the building without inspiration; how had he ever seen the model otherwise? It was little consolation that the other first-year students fared just as badly. He couldn’t believe how confident he’d been half an hour earlier, how certain that everyone in the room would proclaim his work evidence of what a fine architect he would turn out to be.

He knew that the school had a tradition of difficult end-of-term critiques, that few first-year students survived with pride intact. It was the school’s version of an initiation ritual, an annealing that prepared the students for the deeper and more subtle humiliations that would occur when the work under discussion was of their own design. But this critique had been much harsher than he’d imagined-and, what was worse, the comments had seemed justified. He’d worked as hard as he could and it hadn’t been enough, not nearly, not by miles. And his humiliation was linked, in a way he found it impossible to articulate, to the idea of Madame Morgenstern and his relation to her-as though by building a fine replica of the Gare d’Orsay he might have had greater claim upon her affections. Now he couldn’t give her an honest account of the day’s events without revealing himself to be a prideful fool. He left the École Spéciale in a vile mood, a mood tenacious enough to stay with him through the night and the next morning; it was still with him when he went to meet Rosen for their infiltration.

The meeting hall was just around the corner from the palatial Beaux-Arts, a few blocks east of the Gare d’Orsay. Andras didn’t ever want to see that building again. He knew that the critiques he’d received had been accurate; in his zeal to replicate each detail of the building he had failed to grasp its whole, to understand what made the design distinct and alive. This was a classic first-year mistake, Vago had told him on his way out. But if that were the case, why hadn’t Vago cautioned him against it when he’d started? Rosen, too, now claimed a towering hatred for the subject of his model, the École Militaire. They scowled at the sidewalk in companionate symmetry as they made their way down the rue de l’Université.

Since the meeting they were attending was just a recruitment session, there was no need for secrecy or disguise; they arrived with the rest of the attendees, most of whom looked to be students. At a lectern on a low stage at the front of the room, a whip-thin man in an ill-fitting gray suit declared himself to be Monsieur Dupuis, “Secretary to President Pemjean himself,” and clapped his hands for order. The gathering fell silent. Volunteers walked along the aisles, handing out special supplementary sections of a newspaper entitled Le Grand Occident. The Secretary to President Pemjean Himself announced that this supplement set forth the beliefs of the organization, which the governing members would now read aloud to the assembly. A half-dozen grim-looking young fellows gathered on the stage, their copies of the supplement in hand. One by one they read that Jews must be removed from positions of influence in France, and that they should cease to exercise authority over Frenchmen; that Jewish organizations in France must be dissolved, because, while masquerading shamelessly as Jewish welfare agencies, they were working to achieve global domination; that the rights of French citizenship must be taken away from all Jews, who must henceforth be regarded as foreigners-even those whose families had been settled in France for generations; and that all Jewish goods and belongings should become the property of the state.

As each of the tenets was read, there were brief cracklings of applause. Some of the assembled men shouted their approval, and others raised their fists. Still others seemed to disagree, and a few began to argue with the supporters.

“What about the Jews whose brothers or fathers died for France in the Great War?” someone shouted from the balcony.

“Those Zionists died for their own glory, not for the glory of France,” the Secretary to the President Himself called back. “Israelites can’t be trusted to serve France. They must be forbidden to bear arms.”

“Why not let them die, if someone has to die?” another man called.

Rosen curled his hands around the back of the seat in front of him, his knuckles going white. Andras didn’t know what he would do if Rosen started shouting.

“You’re here because you believe in the need for a pure France, for the France our fathers and grandfathers built,” the Secretary to the President continued. “You’re here to lend your strength to the cleansing of France. If you’re not here for that purpose, please depart. We need only the most patriotic, the most true-hearted among you.” The Secretary waited. There was a quiet rumble among the assembly. One of the six young men who had read the tenets shouted, “Vive la France!”

“You will become part of an international alliance-” the Secretary began, but his words disappeared under a sudden staccato din, a wooden clapclacking that rendered his words unintelligible. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the noise ceased. The Secretary cleared his throat, straightened his lapels, and began again. “You will become part-”

This time the noise was even louder than before. It came from every part of the hall. Certain members of the audience had gotten to their feet and were spinning wooden noisemakers on sticks. As before, after a few moments of loud hard clatter, they stopped.