Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“How is he?” Rosen asked, getting to his feet.

“We don’t know yet,” the nurse said.

“Don’t know? Is this a hospital? Are you a nurse? Isn’t it your job to know?”

“All right, Rosen,” Ben Yakov said. “It’s not her fault.”

“I want to speak to that doctor again,” Rosen said.

“I’m afraid he’s making his rounds at the moment.”

“For God’s sake! This is our friend. I just want to know exactly how bad it is.”

“I wish I could tell you myself,” the nurse said.

Rosen sat down again and put his head in his hands. He waited until the nurse had gone off down the ward. “I swear to God,” he said. “I swear to God, if I catch those bastards! I don’t care what happens to me. I don’t care if I do get kicked out of school. I’ll go to jail if I have to. I want to make them regret they were born.” He looked up at Andras and Ben Yakov. “You’ll help me find them, won’t you?”

“Why?” Ben Yakov said. “So we can bash their skulls in?”

“Oh, pardon me,” Rosen said. “I suppose you wouldn’t want to risk having your own pretty nose broken.”

Ben Yakov got up from his chair and took Rosen by the shirtfront. “You think I like seeing him like this?” he said. “You think I don’t want to kill them myself?”

Rosen twisted his shirt out of Ben Yakov’s grasp. “This isn’t just about him. The people who did this to him would do it to us.” He took up his coat and slung it over his arm. “I don’t care if you come with me or not. I’m going to look for them, and when I find them they’re going to answer for what they did.” He jammed his cap onto his head and went off down the ward.

Ben Yakov put a hand to the back of his neck and stood looking at Polaner. Then he sighed and sat down again beside Andras. “Look at him. God, why did he have to meet Lemarque at night? What was he thinking? He can’t be-what they said.”

Andras watched Polaner’s chest rise and fall, a faint disturbance beneath the sheets. “And what if he were?” he said.

Ben Yakov shook his head. “Do you believe it?”

“It’s not impossible.”

Ben Yakov set his chin on his fist and stared at the railing of the bed. He had ceased for the moment to resemble Pierre Fresnay. His eyes were hooded and damp, his mouth drawn into a crumpled line. “There was one time,” he said, slowly. “One day when we were going to meet you and Rosen at the café, he said something about Lemarque. He said he thought Lemarque wasn’t really an anti-Semite-that he hated himself, not Jews. That he had to put on a show so people wouldn’t see him for what he was.”

“What did you say?”

“I said Lemarque could go stuff himself.”

“That’s what I would have said.”

“No,” Ben Yakov said. “You would have listened. You’d have had something intelligent to say in return. You would have asked what made him think so.”

“He’s a private person,” Andras said. “He might not have said more if you’d asked.”

“But I knew something was wrong. You must have noticed it too. You were working on that project with him. Anyone could tell he hadn’t been sleeping, and he was so quiet when Lemarque was around-quieter than usual.”

Andras didn’t know what to say. He’d been consumed with thoughts of Klara, with his anticipation of Tibor’s visit, with his own work. He was aware of Polaner as a constant presence in his life, knew him to be guarded and circumspect, even knew him to brood at times; but he hadn’t considered that Polaner might possess private woes as monumental as his own. If the affair with Klara had been difficult, how much harder might it have been for Polaner to nurse a secret attraction to Lemarque? He had spent little time imagining what it might be like to be a man who favored men. There were plenty of girlish men and boyish women in Paris, of course, and everyone knew the famous clubs and balls where they went to meet: Magic-City, the Monocle, the Bal de la Montagne-Sainte -Geneviève; but that world seemed remote from Andras’s life. What hint of it had there been in his own experience? Things had gone on at gimnázium-boys cultivated friendships that seemed romantic in their intrigues and betrayals; and then there were those times when he and his classmates would stand in a row, their shorts around their ankles, bringing themselves off together in the semidark. There was one boy at school whom everyone said loved boys-Willi Mandl, a lanky blond boy who played piano, wore white embroidered socks, and had been glimpsed one afternoon in a secondhand store dreamily fondling a blue silk reticule. But that was all part of the fog of childhood, nothing that seemed to bear upon his current life.

Now Polaner opened his eyes and looked at Andras. Andras touched Ben Yakov’s sleeve. “Polaner,” Andras said. “Can you hear me?”

“Are they here?” Polaner said, almost unintelligibly.

“We’re here,” Andras said. “Go to sleep. We’re not going to leave you.”

ANDRAS HADN’T BEEN back to the Gare du Nord since he’d arrived from Budapest in September. Now, in late January, as he stood on the platform waiting for Tibor’s train, it amazed him to consider the bulk of ignorance he’d hauled to Paris those few months ago. He’d known almost nothing about architecture. Nothing about the city. Less than nothing about love. He had never touched a woman’s naked body. Hadn’t known French. Those SORTIE signs above the exits might as well have said YOU IDIOT! The past days’ events had only served to remind him how little he still knew of the world. He felt he was just beginning to sense the scope of his own inexperience, his own benightedness; he had scarcely begun to allay it. He’d hoped that by the time he saw his brother again he might feel more like a man, like someone conversant with the wider world. But there was nothing more he could do about that now. Tibor would have to take him as he was.

At a quarter past five the Western Europe Express pulled into the station, filling that glass-and-iron cavern with the screech of brakes. Porters lowered the steps and climbed down; passengers poured forth, men and women haggard from traveling all night. Young men his age, sleepless and uncertain-looking in the wintry light of the station, squinted at the signs and searched for their baggage. Andras scanned the faces of the passengers. As more and more of them passed without a sign of Tibor, he had a moment of fear that his brother had decided not to come after all. And then someone put a hand on his shoulder, and he turned, and there was Tibor Lévi on the platform of the Gare du Nord.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Tibor said, and pulled Andras close.

A carbonated joy rose up in Andras’s chest, a dreamlike sense of relief. He held his brother at arm’s length. Tibor scrutinized Andras from head to toe, his gaze coming to rest on Andras’s hole-ridden shoes.

“It’s a good thing you have a brother who’s a shoe clerk,” he said. “Or was one. Those filthy oxfords wouldn’t have lasted you another week.”

They retrieved Tibor’s bags and took a cab to the Latin Quarter, a trip Andras found surprisingly brief and direct, and he grasped how pro-foundry his first Parisian cab driver had cheated him. The streets flashed past almost too quickly; he wanted to show Tibor everything at once. They flew down the boulevard de Sébastopol and over the Île de la Cité, and were turning onto the rue des Écoles in what felt like an instant. The Latin Quarter crouched beneath a haze of rain, its sidewalks crowded with umbrellas. They rushed Tibor’s bags through the drizzle and dragged them upstairs. When they reached Andras’s garret, Tibor stood in the doorway and laughed.