The Invisible Bridge (10 page)

He was looking for work. He was willing to do anything. Surely it would be in the spirit of Brecht's play to give work to someone who wanted it. And hadn't Sarah Bernhardt been Jewish, after all? Her mother had been a Dutch-Jewish courtesan, and of course Judaism was matrilineal.
He
knew. Though he had been baptized in the Catholic church and sent to Catholic schools, his own mother had been Jewish, too.

"All right, young Levi," he said, laying a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Why don't you come by the theater tomorrow afternoon?"

And Andras turned such a brilliant and grateful smile upon him that Novak felt a fleeting shock of fear. Such trust. Such hope. What the world would do to a boy like Andras Levi, Novak didn't want to know.

THEMOTHER
had twenty-seven actors: nine women, eighteen men. They worked six days a week, and in that time they performed seven shows. Backstage they had few moments to spare and an astonishing number of needs. Their costumes had to be mended and pressed, their lapdogs walked, their letters posted, their voices soothed with tea, their dinners ordered. Occasionally they needed the services of a dentist or a doctor. They had to run lines and take quick restorative naps. They had to cultivate their offstage romances.

Two of the men were in love with two of the women, and the two beloved women each loved the wrong man. Notes flew between the enamored parties. Flowers were sent, received, destroyed; chocolates were sent and consumed.

Into this mayhem Andras descended ready to work, and the assistant stage manager set him to it at once. If Monsieur Hammond broke a shoelace, Andras was to find him another. If the bichon frise who belonged to Madame Pillol needed to be fed, Andras was to feed him. Notes had to be transmitted between the director and the principals, between the stage manager and the assistant stage manager, between the offstage lovers. When the displaced Claudine Villareal-Bloch arrived at the theater to demand her role back, she had to be appeased with praise. (The fact was, the assistant stage manager told Andras, Villareal-Bloch had been dismissed for good; Marcelle Gerard was making a killing in the role. The Bernhardt was selling out its seats every night for the first time in five years.) It was unclear to Andras how anything had been accomplished backstage at the Sarah-Bernhardt before he was hired. By the time the performance began on his first day of work, he was too exhausted even to watch from the wings. He fell asleep on a sofa he didn't know was needed for the second act, and was jostled awake when two stagehands hoisted it to move it onstage. He scrambled off just as the actors were leaving the stage after the first act, and found himself the recipient of countless requests for aid.

That night he stayed until long after the performance was over. Claudel, the assistant stage manager, had told him he must always remain until the last actor had gone home; that night it was Marcelle Gerard who lingered. At the end of the evening he stood outside her dressing room, waiting for her to finish talking to Zoltan Novak. He could hear the thrill in Madame Gerard's rapid French through the dressing-room door. He liked the sound of it, and felt he wouldn't mind if there were something he could do for her before he left for the evening. At last Monsieur Novak emerged, a look of vague trouble creasing his forehead. He seemed surprised to see Andras standing there.

"It's midnight, my boy," he said. "Time to go home."

"Monsieur Claudel instructed me to stay until all the actors had gone."

"Aha. Well done, then. And here's something for your dinner, an advance against your first week's pay." Novak handed Andras a few folded bills. "Get something more substantial than a pretzel," he said, and went off down the hall to his office, rubbing the back of his neck.

Andras unfolded the bills. Two hundred fifty francs, enough for two weeks'

dinners at the student dining club. He gave a low whistle of relief and tucked the bills into his jacket pocket.

Madame Gerard emerged from her dressing room, her broad face pale and plain without her stage makeup. She carried a brown Turkish valise, and her scarf was knotted tight as if to keep her warm during a long walk home. But Claudel had said that Madame Gerard must have a taxi, so Andras asked her to wait at the stage door while he hailed one on the quai de Gesvres. By now the autograph-seekers had all gone. Madame Gerard had signed more than a hundred autographs at the stage door after the show. Andras held her arm as she walked to the curb. He could feel that her tweed coat had worn thin at the elbow. She paused at the open door of the cab and met his eyes, her scarf framing her face. She had a wide arched brow with narrow eyebrows; her strong bones gave her a look of nobility that would have suited her in the role of a queen, but served her equally well in the role of the proletarian Mother.

"You're new here," she said. "What is your name?"

"Andras Levi," said Andras, with a slight bow.

She repeated his name twice, as if to commit it to memory. "A pleasure to meet you, Andras Levi. Thank you for seeing about the car." She climbed inside, drew her coat around her legs, and closed the door.

As he watched the cab make its way down the quai de Gesvres toward the Pont d'Arcole, he found himself replaying the brief script of their conversation. In his mind he heard her saying
tres heureux de faire votre connaissance
, which meant
orulok, hogy
megismerhetem
in Hungarian. How was it that he seemed to have heard an echo of
orulok
beneath her
tres heureux?
Was everyone in Paris secretly Hungarian? He laughed aloud to think of it: all the Right Bank women in their fur coats, the theatergoers in their long cars, the jazz-loving art students in their fraying jackets, all nursing a secret hunger for paprikas and peasant bread as they ate their bouillabaisse and baguettes. As he walked across the river he felt a rising lightness at the center of his chest. He had a job. He would earn his fifty percent. New pencils lay sharp on his worktable, and it seemed not impossible that he might finish his drawings of the d'Orsay before morning.

He worked all night without pause and managed to stay awake through his morning classes. Then he fell asleep in a corner of the library and didn't wake for hours.

When he did, he found a note pinned to his lapel in Rosen's handwriting:
Meet us at the
Blue Dove at 5, you lazy ass
. Andras sat up and dug his knuckles into his eyes. He pulled his father's watch from his pocket and checked the time. Four o'clock. In three hours he would have to be back at work. All he wanted was to go home to his bed. He shuffled out into the hall and went to the men's room, where he found that his upper lip had been inked with a Clark Gable-style moustache while he slept. Leaving the moustache in place, he combed his hair with his fingers and tugged his jacket straight.

The Blue Dove Cafe was a good half-hour walk up the boulevard Raspail and across the Latin Quarter. Andras was the first to arrive; he took a table at the back, near the bar, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a pot of tea. The tea came with two butter biscuits with an almond pressed into the center of each. That was why students liked the Blue Dove: It was generous. In the Latin Quarter it was a rarity to receive two biscuits with a pot of tea, much less almond biscuits. By the time he'd finished the tea and eaten the biscuits, Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov had arrived. They unwound their scarves and pulled chairs up to the table.

Rosen kissed Andras on both cheeks. "Gorgeous moustache," he said.

"We thought you were dead," said Ben Yakov. "Or at least in a coma."

"I was nearly dead."

"We took bets," Ben Yakov said. "Rosen bet you'd sleep all night. I bet you'd meet us here. Polaner abstained, because he's broke."

Polaner blushed. Of the three of them he came from the wealthiest family, but his family's kingdom was a garment business in Krakow and his father had no idea how much things really cost in Paris. Every month he sent Polaner not quite enough to keep him clothed and fed. Acutely aware of his growing debt to his father, Polaner couldn't bear to ask him for more. As a child of privilege he had never worked, and seemed never to consider taking a job as a possible means to ease his situation. Instead he ordered hot water at cafes and patched his shoes with thick pasteboard left over from model-building and saved extra bread from the student dining club.

With his pocket full of bills, Andras knew it was his turn to buy everyone a drink.

They all had tiny glasses of whiskey and soda, the drink of American movie stars. They cursed the Hungarian government and its attempt to remove Andras from their company, and then toasted his new role as the courier of actors' love notes and the walker of actors'

dogs. When the whiskey-and-sodas were gone, they ordered another large pot of tea.

"Ben Yakov has an assignation tonight," Rosen announced.

"What do you mean, an assignation?" Andras said.

"A rendezvous. A meeting. Possibly romantic in nature."

"With

whom?"

"Only with the beautiful Lucia," Rosen said, and Ben Yakov laced his fingers and flexed them in mute glory. A hush fell over the table. They all revered Lucia, with her deep velvet voice and her skin the color of polished mahogany. At night, alone in their beds, they had all imagined her stepping out of her dress and slip, standing naked before them in their darkened rooms. By day they had been shamed by her talent in studio. She didn't just work in the office; she was a fourth-year student, one of the best in her class, and it was rumored that Mallet-Stevens had particularly praised her work.

"Cheers to Ben Yakov," Andras said, raising his cup.

"Cheers," said the others. Ben Yakov raised a hand in mock modesty.

"Of course, he'll never tell us what happens," Rosen said. "Ben Yakov's affairs are his own."

"Unlike Monsieur Rosen's," said Ben Yakov. "Monsieur Rosen's affairs belong to everyone. If only your ladies knew!"

"It's the city of love," Rosen said. "We should all be making love." He used the vulgar word for it,
baiser
. "What's wrong, Polaner? Do I offend?"

"I'm not listening," Polaner said.

"Polaner is a gentleman," said Ben Yakov. "Gentlemen
ne baisent pas."

"On the contrary," said Andras. "Gentlemen are great
baiseurs
. I've just finished reading
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. It's full of gentlemen
baisent."

"I'm not sure you're qualified to enter this conversation," Rosen said. "At least Polaner had a
petite amie
back home. His Krakovian bride-to-be, isn't that right?" He pushed Polaner's shoulder, and Polaner blushed again; he'd mentioned a few letters from the girl, the daughter of a woolens manufacturer whom his father expected him to marry.

"He's done it all before, whether he likes to talk about it or not," Rosen said. "But you, Andras, you've never done it."

"That's a lie," Andras said, though it was true.

"Paris is full of girls," Rosen said. "We should arrange an assignation for you.

One of a professional nature, I mean."

"With whose money?" Ben Yakov said.

"Didn't artists at one time have benefactors?" Rosen said. "Where are our benefactors?" He stood and repeated the question at full volume to the room at large. A few of the other patrons raised their glasses. But there was not a prospective benefactor among them; they were all students, with their pots of tea and two biscuits, their left-leaning newspapers, their threadbare coats.

"At least I have a job," Andras said.

"Well, save up, save up!" Rosen said. "You can't stay a virgin forever."

At work he ran from one task to another like a sous-chef assisting in the preparation of a twelve-course meal, each task ending just as another was beginning, all of it under the mounting pressure of time. Claudel, the assistant stage manager, was Basque and had a temper that often expressed itself in the throwing of props, which would then have to be fixed before they were needed onstage. As a result the props-master had quit, and the props had fallen into disrepair. Claudel terrorized the prompters and the stagehands, the assistant director and the wardrobe mistress; he even terrorized his own superior, the stage manager himself, Monsieur d'Aubigne, who was too afraid of Claudel's wrath to complain to Monsieur Novak. But particularly Claudel terrorized Andras, who made a point of being close at hand. Andras knew he didn't mean any harm.

Claudel was a perfectionist, and any perfectionist would have been driven mad by the confusion of the Bernhardt backstage. Messages got lost, the masterless props lay about at random, parts of costumes were misplaced; no one ever knew how long it was until curtain or the end of intermission. It seemed a miracle that the show could be performed at all. His first week there, Andras built pigeonholes for the exchange of notes between stage manager, assistant stage manager, director, cast, and crew; he bought two cheap wall clocks and hung them in the wings; he knocked together a few rough shelves, lined up the props upon them, and marked each spot with the act and scene in which the prop was to be used. Within a few days, a sense of tranquility began to emerge backstage.

Whole acts would pass without an outburst from Claudel. The stagehands commented upon the change to the stage manager, who commented upon the change to Zoltan Novak, and Novak congratulated Andras. Emboldened by his success, Andras asked for and received seventy-five francs a week to stock a table with coffee and cream and chocolate biscuits and jam and bread for everyone backstage. Soon his mailbox was stuffed with notes of gratitude.

Madame Gerard in particular seemed to have taken a special interest in Andras.

She began to call upon him not only to perform her errands, but also for his company.

After the show, when the rest of the actors had gone, she liked to have him sit in her dressing room and talk to her while she removed her makeup. Her demaquillage took so long that Andras came to suspect that she dreaded going home. He knew she lived alone, though he didn't know where; he imagined a rose-colored flat papered with old show posters. She spoke little about her own life, except to tell him that he'd guessed her origins correctly: She had been born in Budapest, and her mother had taught the young Marcelle to speak both French and Hungarian. But she required Andras to speak only French to her; practice was the best way to master the language, she said. She wanted to hear about Budapest, about the job at
Past and Future
, about his family; he told her about Matyas's penchant for dancing, and about Tibor's impending departure for Modena.