Julie Orringer: The InvisibleBridge

Last weekend when he’d gone home to Konyár say goodbye to his parents, he’d found himself confessing his fears to his father as they walked through the orchard after dinner. He hadn’t meant to say anything; between the boys and their father was the tacit understanding that as Hungarian men, they were not to show any sign of weakness, even at times of crisis. But as they passed between the apple rows, kicking through the knee-high stems of wild grass, Andras felt compelled to speak. Why, he wondered aloud, had he been singled out for recognition among all the artists in the show in Paris? How had the École Spéciale admissions board determined that he, in particular, deserved their favor? Even if his pieces had shown some special merit, who was to say he could ever produce work like that again, or, more to the point, that he’d succeed at the study of architecture, a discipline vastly different from any he’d undertaken before? At best, he told his father, he was the beneficiary of misplaced faith; at worst, a simple fraud.

His father threw his head back and laughed. “A fraud?” he said. “You, who used to read aloud to me from Miklós Ybl when you were eight years old?”

“It’s one thing to love an art and another to be good at it.”

“There was a time when men studied architecture just because it was a noble pursuit,” his father said.

“There are nobler pursuits. The medical arts, for example.”

“That’s your brother’s talent. You’ve got your own. And now you’ve got time and money to court it.”

“And what if I fail?”

“Ah! Then you’ll have a story to tell.”

Andras picked up a fallen branch from the ground and switched at the long grass. “It seems selfish,” he said. “Going off to school in Paris, and at someone else’s expense.”

“You’d be going at my expense if I could afford it, believe me. I won’t have you think of it as selfish.”

“What if you get pneumonia again this year? The lumberyard can’t run itself.”

“Why not? I’ve got the foreman and five good sawyers. And Mátyás isn’t far away if I need more help.”

“Mátyás, that little crow?” Andras shook his head. “Even if you could catch him, you’d be lucky to get any work out of him.”

“Oh, I could get work out of him,” his father said. “Though I hope I won’t have to. That scapegrace will have trouble enough graduating, with all the foolery he’s gotten into this past year. Did you know he’s joined some sort of dance troupe? He’s performing nights at a club and missing his morning classes.”

“I’ve heard all about it. All the more reason I shouldn’t be going off to school so far away. Once he moves to Budapest, someone’s got to look after him.”

“It’s not your fault you can’t go to school in Budapest,” his father said. “You’re at the mercy of your circumstances. I know something of that. But you do what you can with what you’ve got.”

Andras understood what he meant. His father had gone to the Jewish theological seminary in Prague, and might have become a rabbi if it hadn’t been for his own father’s early death; a series of tragedies had attended him through his twenties, enough to have made a weaker man surrender to despair. Since then he’d experienced a reversal of fortune so profound that everyone in the village believed he must have been particularly pitied and favored by the Almighty. But Andras knew that everything good that had come to him was the result of his own sheer stubbornness and hard work.

“It’s a blessing you’re going to Paris,” his father said. “Better to get out of this country where Jewish men have to feel second-class. I can promise you that’s not going to improve while you’re gone, though let’s hope it won’t get worse.”

Now, as Andras rode westward in the darkened railway carriage, he heard those words in his mind again; he understood that there had been another fear beneath the ones he’d spoken aloud. He found himself thinking of a newspaper story he’d read recently about a horrible thing that had happened a few weeks earlier in the Polish town of Sandomierz: In the middle of the night the windows of shops in the Jewish Quarter had been broken, and small paper-wrapped projectiles had been thrown inside. When the shop owners unwrapped the projectiles, they saw that they were the sawn-off hooves of goats. Jews’ Feet, the paper wrappings read.

Nothing like that had ever happened in Konyár; Jews and non-Jews had lived there in relative peace for centuries. But the seeds were there, Andras knew. At his primary school in Konyár, his schoolmates had called him Zsidócska, little Jew; when they’d all gone swimming, his circumcision had been a mark of shame. One time they held him down and tried to force a sliver of pork sausage between his clenched teeth. Those boys’ older brothers had tormented Tibor, and a younger set had been waiting for Mátyás when he got to school. How would those Konyár boys, now grown into men, read the news from Poland? What seemed an atrocity to him might seem to them like justice, or permission. He put his head against the cool glass of the window and stared into the unfamiliar landscape, surprised only by how much it looked like the flatland country where he had been born.

In Vienna the train stopped at a station far grander than any Andras had ever seen. The façade, ten stories high, was composed of glass panes supported by a gridwork of gilded iron; the supports were curlicued and flowered and cherubed in a design that seemed better suited to a boudoir than a train station. Andras got off the train and followed the scent of bread to a cart where a woman in a white cap was selling salt-studded pretzels. But the woman wouldn’t take his pengő or his francs. In her insistent German she tried to explain what Andras must do, pointing him toward the money-changing booth. The line at the booth snaked around a corner. Andras looked at the station clock and then at the stack of pretzels. It had been eight hours since he’d eaten the delicate sandwiches at the house on Benczúr utca.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to find the gentleman from Keleti Station, the one who had let Tibor use his umbrella to retrieve Andras’s passport. The man was dressed in a gray traveling suit and a light overcoat; the dull gold of a watch chain shone against his vest. He was barrel-chested and tall, his dark hair brushed back in waves from a high domed forehead. He carried a glossy briefcase and a copy of La Revue du Cinema.

“Let me buy you a pretzel,” he said. “I’ve got some schillings.”

“You’ve been too kind already,” Andras said.

But the man stepped forward and bought two pretzels, and they went to a nearby bench to eat. The gentleman pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from a pocket and spread it over his trouser legs.

“I like a fresh-made pretzel better than anything they serve in the dining car,” the man said. “Besides, the first-class passengers tend to be first-class bores.”

Andras nodded, eating in silence. The pretzel was still hot, the salt electric on his tongue.

“I gather you’re going on past Vienna,” the man said.

“ Paris,” Andras ventured. “I’m going there to study.”

The man turned his deep-lined eyes on Andras and scrutinized him for a long moment. “A future scientist? A man of law?”

“Architecture,” Andras said.

“Very good. A practical art.”

“And yourself?” Andras asked. “What’s your destination?”

“The same as yours,” the man said. “I run a theater in Paris, the Sarah-Bernhardt. Though it might be more correct to say the Sarah-Bernhardt runs me. Like a demanding mistress, I’m afraid. Theater: Now, there’s an impractical art.”