Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Go home, now,” the nurse said. “We’ll take care of your wife. She needs to rest. You can visit her this afternoon.”

“She’s not my wife,” Andras said. “She’s a friend. I told her husband I’d stay with her until he got back.”

The nurse raised an eyebrow, as if something weren’t quite right about Andras’s story, and went back to her patient down the ward.

Through the windows the sky continued its slow bleed toward blue. The quiet of the ward seemed to deepen as he looked at Ilana, her chest rising and falling beneath the sheet. The drug had enclosed her within a transparent capsule of sleep, like the princess in the fairy tale, Hófehérke-in French it must be Blanche-Neige-the exiled princess sleeping in her glass coffin on a hill, while those little men, the törpék, watched over her. He thought again of the Marot poem he’d cut from Klara’s book. If fire dwells secretly in snow, how can I escape burning? He was glad Ben Yakov hadn’t been there when Ilana had spoken, glad he hadn’t seen her lips flush with color when she’d thought it was Tibor watching over the bed.

Ben Yakov returned forty minutes later, redolent of new-mown grass; the back of his pajama shirt was damp with dew. He took off his cap and smoothed his hair.

“How is she?”

“Fine,” Andras said. “The nurse gave her a shot of morphine.”

“Go on home, now,” Ben Yakov said. “I’ll stay with her until she wakes up.”

“We’re both supposed to leave. The nurse says she has to rest. We can come back this afternoon.”

Ben Yakov didn’t protest. He touched Ilana’s pale forehead and let Andras lead him from the ward. All the way back to the Latin Quarter they walked in silence, their hands stuffed into their pockets. It seemed a particularly cruel morning to have lost a child, Andras thought: A loamy damp scent arose from the window boxes, from the new flowerbeds in the park; the branches of the chestnuts were crowded with small wet leaves. He walked Ben Yakov to the door of his apartment building and they faced each other on the sidewalk.

“You’re a good friend,” Ben Yakov said.

Andras shrugged and looked at the pavement. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Of course you did. You and Klara, both.”

“You would have done the same for us.”

“I’m not much good as a friend,” Ben Yakov said. “Still worse as a husband.”

“Don’t say that.”

“People like me shouldn’t be allowed to marry.” Even after a night at the hospital and an hour’s sleep on a bench, he was elegant in his angular, cinematic way. But he twisted his mouth into a grimace of self-disgust. “I’m neglectful,” he said. “And, to be honest, unfaithful.”

Andras kicked at the boot scraper beside the entryway. He didn’t want to hear anything more about it. He wanted to turn and walk home to the rue des Écoles, climb into bed and sleep. But he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t heard what Ben Yakov had just said.

“Unfaithful,” he said. “When?”

“Always. Whenever she’ll see me. It’s Lucia, of course. From school.” Ben Yakov’s voice had fallen to a half whisper. “I’ve never been able to break it off. Even this morning she came out and sat in the park with me while you watched over my wife. I’m in love, I think, or something horrible like that. I have been ever since I met her.”

Andras felt a surge of indignation on behalf of the girl in the hospital bed. “If you were in love with her, why did you bring Ilana here?”

“I thought she might cure me,” Ben Yakov said. “When I met her in Florence, she made me forget Lucia. She delighted me. And, though it’s shameful to say, her innocence was arousing. She made me think I could be a different person, and for a time I was.” He lowered his eyes. “I was excited about the prospect of marrying her. I knew I couldn’t have married Lucia. She doesn’t want to marry, for one thing. She wants to be an architect and travel the world. For another thing, she’s-une negresse. My parents, you know. I couldn’t.”

Andras thought of the classmate who’d been attacked in the graveyard, the man from Côte d’Ivoire. That style of bigotry was supposed to belong to the other side. But it didn’t, of course. Hadn’t he himself been terrified to speak to Lucia because of her race, and, at the same time, inexplicably excited by her? What if he had fallen in love with her? Could he have married her? Could he have brought her to his parents? He took Ben Yakov’s shoulder in his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Truly.”

“It’s my own fault,” Ben Yakov said. “I should never have married Ilana.”

“You ought to get some sleep now,” Andras said. “You’ll need to go back to see her this afternoon.”

A flint spark of fear burned for an instant in Ben Yakov’s eyes. Andras recognized the expression; he’d seen it countless times on his younger brother’s face at bedtime, just before Andras snuffed the candle. It was the panic of a child afraid to be left alone in the dark. Countless times, Andras had lain down beside Mátyás and listened to him breathing until he fell asleep. But they were adults, he and Ben Yakov; the comfort they could ask of each other was finite. Ben Yakov repeated his thanks and turned away to unlock the door.

The second thing that happened that month-the second thing important enough to turn Andras’s attention away from the increasingly grim headlines-was that the architecture contest came to a close. After a week of sleepless nights during which he experienced nausea, hallucinations, and the vertiginous thrill of last-minute inspiration, he and Polaner found themselves in the crowded amphitheater, waiting to defend their project before the judging panel. Professor Vago had invited Monsieur Lemain to lead the trio of judges. The other two, whose identities had been kept secret until the day of the prize critique, turned out to be none other than Le Corbusier and Georges-Henri Pingusson. Le Corbusier was dressed as if he had come directly from a construction site; his plaster-whitened trousers and sweat-stained workshirt seemed a silent reproach to Lemain in his impeccable black suit, and to Pingusson in his pearl-gray pinstriped jacket. Perret, presiding over the contest, had waxed his moustache to crisp points and put on his most dramatic military cape. The judges walked a slow circuit of the room, examining the models on their display tables and the plans posted on corkboards around the periphery of the amphitheater, and the students followed in a respectful cluster.

Before long, it became clear that a profound difference of opinion existed between Le Corbusier and Pingusson. Everything one said, the other denounced as pure foolishness. At one point Le Corbusier went so far as to poke Pingusson in the chest with his pencil; Pingusson responded by shouting directly into Le Corbusier’s reddened face. The issue at hand was a pair of Dianalike caryatids, the entryway ornamentation of a sports club for women designed by a pair of fourth-year women. Le Corbusier declared the caryatids neoclassicist kitsch. Pingusson said he found them perfectly elegant.

“Elegant!” Le Corbusier spat. “Perhaps you would have said the same of Speer’s monstrosity at the International Exposition! Plenty of hack neoclassicism in evidence there.”

“I beg your pardon,” Pingsson said. “Are you suggesting we forget the Greeks and Romans entirely, simply because the Nazis have appropriated them? Bastardized them, I might say?”

“Everything must be taken in context,” Le Corbusier said. “At the present political moment, this choice seems indefensible. Though perhaps we’re to give the young women a pass because, after all, they’re just women.” Those were the words he punctuated with a pair of jabs to Pingusson’s chest.