Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“I welcome your enthusiasm, gentlemen,” the Secretary continued. “But, if you please, wait until-”

The noise exploded again, and his time it did not cease. The men with noisemakers-there were perhaps twenty or thirty of them among the assembly-pushed into the aisles and spun their instruments as hard and as loud as they could. These were Purim noisemakers, Andras saw now-the wooden graggers used at synagogue during the reading of the story of Esther, whenever the villain Haman’s name occurred in the text. He glanced at Rosen, who had understood, too. The Secretary banged on his lectern. The six grim-faced men onstage stood at attention, as if awaiting an order from the Secretary. More men pushed out of the rows and into the aisles, bearing large banners that they unrolled and held high so the audience could see them. Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme, read one. Stop the French Hitlerians, said another. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, read a third. The men holding the banners sent up a cheer, and an angry roar burst from the audience. The thin Secretary to the President flushed a surprising purple. Rosen let out a whoop and pulled Andras into the aisle, and the two of them helped to hoist one of the banners. One member of the Ligue, a tall broad-shouldered man in a tricolor neckerchief, produced a megaphone and began to shout, “Free men of France! Don’t let these bigots poison your minds!”

The Secretary growled an order at the six stern-faced young men, and in another moment all was chaos in the assembly hall. The seats emptied. Some audience members pulled at the banners, others pursued the men with the noisemakers. The six men who had read the beliefs of the organization went after the man with the megaphone, but other men defended him in a ring as he continued to urge Fraternité! Egalité! The Secretary disappeared behind a curtain at the back of the stage. Men shoved Andras from behind, kicked at his knees, elbowed him in the chest. Andras wouldn’t let go of the banner. He raised the pole high and shouted Stop the French Hitlerians. Rosen was no longer at his side; Andras couldn’t see him in the crowd. Someone tried to take the banner and Andras wrestled with the man; someone else grabbed him by the collar, and a blow caught him across the jaw. He stumbled against a column, spat blood onto the floor. All around him, men shouted and fought. He shoved his way toward an exit, feeling his teeth with his tongue and wondering if he’d have to see a dentist. In the vestibule he found Rosen grappling with a massive bald man in work overalls. As though he meant to fight Rosen himself, Andras caught him around the waist and wrenched him away, sending Rosen shoulder-first into a wall. The man in overalls, finding his arms empty, charged back into the fray of the auditorium. Andras and Rosen staggered out of the building, past streams of policemen who were rushing up the steps to break up the riot. When they’d gotten clear of the crowd, they tore down the rue de Solférino, all the way to the quai d’Orsay, where they cast themselves down on a pair of benches and lay panting.

“So we weren’t the only ones!” Rosen said, touching his ribs with his fingertips. Andras felt the inside of his lip with his tongue. His cheek still bled where his teeth had cut it, but the teeth were intact. At the sound of quick footsteps he looked up to see three members of the Ligue running down the street, their banners flapping. Other men chased them. Policemen chased the others.

“I’d love to see the look on that secretary’s face again,” Rosen said.

“You mean the Secretary to the President Himself?”

Rosen put his hands on his knees and laughed. But then an ambulance rushed down the street in the direction of the assembly hall, and a few moments later another followed. Not long afterward, more Ligue members passed; these looked pale and stricken, and they dragged their banners on the sidewalk and held their hats in their hands. Andras and Rosen watched them in silence. Something grave had happened: Someone from the Ligue had been hurt. Andras took off his own hat and held it on his lap, his adrenaline dissolving into hollow dread. Le Grand Occident wasn’t the only group of its kind; there had to be dozens of similar meetings taking place all over Paris that very minute. And if meetings like that were taking place in Paris, then what was going on in the less enlightened cities of Europe? Andras pulled his jacket tighter around himself, beginning to feel the cold again. Rosen got to his feet; he, too, had become quiet and serious.

“Far worse things are going to happen here,” he said. “Wait and see.”

On the rue de Sévigné the next day, Madame Morgenstern and Elisabet sat in silence as Andras described the incidents of the past forty-eight hours. He told them about the critique, and how far his work had fallen in his own estimation; he told them what had happened at the meeting. He produced a clipping from that morning’s L’Oeuvre and read it aloud. The article described the disrupted recruitment session and the melee that followed. Each group blamed the other for initiating the violence: Pemjean took the opportunity to point out the deviousness and belligerence of the Jewish people, and Gérard Lecache, president of the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme, called the incident a manifestation of Le Grand Occident’s violent intent. The newspaper abandoned all pretense of journalistic objectivity to praise the Maccabean bravery of the Ligue, and to accuse Le Grand Occident of bigotry, ignorance, and barbarism; two members of the Ligue, it turned out, had been beaten senseless and were now hospitalized at the Hôtel-Dieu.

“You might have been killed!” Elisabet said. Her tone was acidic as usual, but for an instant she gave him a look of what seemed like genuine concern. “What were you thinking? Did you imagine you’d take on all those brutes at once? Thirty of you against two hundred of them?”

“We weren’t part of the plan,” Andras said. “We didn’t know the LICA was going to be there. When they started making noise, we joined in.”

“Ridiculous fools, all of you,” Elisabet said.

Madame Morgenstern fixed her gray eyes upon Andras. “Take care you don’t get in trouble with the police,” she said. “Remember, you’re a guest in France. You don’t want to be deported because of an incident like this.”

“They wouldn’t deport me,” Andras said. “Not for serving the ideals of France.”

“They certainly would,” Madame Morgenstern said. “And that would be the end of your studies. Whatever you do, you must protect your status here. Your presence in France is a political statement to begin with.”

“He’ll never last here, anyway,” Elisabet said, the moment of concern having passed. “He’ll fail out of school by the end of the year. His professors think he’s talentless. Weren’t you listening?” She peeled herself from the velvet chair and slouched off to her bedroom, where they could hear her knocking around as she got ready to go out. A few moments later she emerged in an olive-green dress and a black wool cap. She’d braided her hair and scrubbed her cheeks into a windy redness. Pocketbook in one hand, gloves in the other, she stood in the sitting-room doorway and gave a half wave.

“Don’t wait up for me,” she told her mother. Then, as an apparent afterthought, she arrowed a look of disdain in Andras’s direction. “There’s no need to come next weekend, Champion of France,” she said. “I’ll be skiing with Marthe in Chamonix. In fact, I wish you’d desist altogether.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and ran down the stairs, and they heard the door slam and jingle behind her.

Madame Morgenstern lowered her forehead into her hand. “How much longer will she be like this, do you think? You weren’t like this when you were sixteen, were you?”