The Invisible Bridge (4 page)

"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."

"Must art be practical?"

The man laughed. "No, indeed." And then: "Do you go to the theater?"

"Not often enough."

"You'll have to come to the Sarah-Bernhardt, then. Present my card at the box office and tell them I sent you. Say you're a
compatriote
of mine." He extracted a card from a gold case and handed it to Andras.
NOVAK Zoltan, metteur en scene, Theatre
Sarah-Bernhardt
.

Andras had heard of Sarah Bernhardt but knew little about her. "Did Madame Bernhardt perform there?" he asked. "Or"--more hesitantly--"does she still?"

The man folded the paper wrapper of his pretzel. "She did," he said. "For many years. Back then it was called Theatre de la Ville. But that was before my time. Madame Bernhardt is long dead, I'm afraid."

"I'm an ignoramus," Andras said.

"Not at all. You remind me of myself as a young man, off to Paris for the first time. You'll be fine. You come from a fine family. I saw the way your brother looked out for you. Keep my card, in any case. Zoltan Novak."

"Andras Levi." They shook hands, then returned to their railway cars--Novak to the first-class wagon-lit, Andras to the lesser comforts of third class.

It took him another two days to get to Paris, two days during which he had to travel through Germany, into the source of the growing dread that radiated across Europe.

In Stuttgart there was a delay, a mechanical problem that had to be fixed before the train could go on. Andras was dizzy with hunger. He had no choice but to exchange a few francs for reichsmarks and find something to eat. At the exchange counter, a gap-toothed matron in a gray tunic made him sign a document affirming that he would spend all the exchanged money within the borders of Germany. He tried to enter a cafe near the station to buy a sandwich, but on the door there was a small sign, hand-lettered in Gothic characters, that read
Jews Not Wanted
. He looked through the glass door at a young girl reading a comic book behind the pastry counter. She must have been fifteen or sixteen, a white kerchief on her head, a thin gold chain at her throat. She raised her eyes and smiled at Andras. He took a step back and glanced down at the reichsmark coins in his hand--on one side an eagle with a wreathed swastika in its claws, on the other the mustachioed profile of Paul von Hindenburg--then back over his shoulder at the girl in the shop. The reichsmarks were nothing more than a few drops of blood in the country's vast economic circulatory system, but suddenly he felt desperate to be rid of them; he didn't want to eat the food they could buy him, even if he found a shop where
Juden
were not
unerwunscht
.

Quickly, making sure no one saw what he was doing, he knelt and dropped the coins into the echoing mouth of a storm drain. Then he returned to the train without having eaten anything, and rode hungry through the final hundred kilometers of Germany. From the platform of every small-town German station, Nazi flags fluttered in the slipstream of the train. The red flag spilled from the topmost story of buildings, decorated the awnings of houses, appeared in miniature in the hands of a group of children marching in the courtyard of a school beside the tracks. By the time they crossed the border into France, Andras felt as though he'd been holding his breath for hours.

They passed through the rolling countryside and the little half-timbered villages and the interminable flat suburbs and finally the outer arrondissements of Paris itself. It was eleven o'clock at night before they reached the station. Struggling with his leather satchel, his overcoat, his portfolio, Andras made his way down the aisle of the train and out onto the platform. On the wall opposite, a mural fifty feet high showed serious young soldiers, their eyes hooded with determination, leaving to fight the Great War. On another wall hung a series of cloth banners that depicted a more recent battle--a Spanish one, Andras guessed from the soldiers' uniforms. The overhead loudspeakers crackled with French; among the travelers on the platform, the low buzz of French and the lilt of Italian crossed the harsher cadences of German and Polish and Czech. Andras scanned the crowd for a young man in an expensive overcoat who seemed to be looking for someone.

He hadn't asked for a description or a photograph of Jozsef. It hadn't occurred to him that they might have trouble finding each other. But an increasing number of passengers filled the platform, and Parisians ran to greet them, and Jozsef failed to appear. Amid the crush Andras caught a glimpse of Zoltan Novak; a woman in a smart hat and a fur-collared coat threw her arms around him. Novak kissed the woman and led her away from the train, and porters followed with his luggage.

Andras retrieved his own suitcase and the enormous box for Jozsef. He stood and waited as the crowd became even more dense and then began to dissipate. Still no brisk-looking young man stepped forward to conduct him into a life in Paris. He sat down on the wooden crate, suddenly lightheaded. He needed a place to sleep. He needed to eat. In a few days' time he was supposed to appear at the Ecole Speciale, ready to begin his studies. He looked toward the row of doors marked
SORTIE
, at the lights of cars passing on the street outside. A quarter of an hour rolled by, and then another, without any sign of Jozsef Hasz.

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the heavy card on which the elder Mrs. Hasz had written her grandson's address. This was all the direction he had. For six francs Andras recruited a walrus-faced porter to help him load his luggage and Jozsef's enormous box into a taxi. He gave the driver Jozsef's address and they rushed off in the direction of the Quartier Latin. As they sped along, the taxi driver kept up a steady stream of jocose French, of which Andras understood not a word.

He was hardly aware of what they passed on the way to Jozsef Hasz's. Fog tumbled in billows through the light of the streetlamps, and wet leaves blew against the windows of the cab. The gold-lit buildings spun by in a rush; the streets were full of Saturday night revelers, men and women with their arms slung loosely around each other.

The cab sped over a river that must have been the Seine, and for an instant Andras allowed himself to imagine that they were passing over the Danube, that he was back in Budapest, and that in a short time he'd find himself home at the apartment on Harsfa utca, where he could climb the stairs and crawl into bed with Tibor. But then the taxi stopped in front of a gray stone building and the driver climbed out to unload Andras's luggage.

Andras fumbled in his pocket for more money. The driver tipped his hat, took the francs Andras offered, and said something that sounded like the Hungarian word
bocsanat
, I'm sorry, but which Andras later understood to be
bon chance
. Then the cab pulled away, leaving Andras alone on a sidewalk of the Quartier Latin.

JOZSEF H ASZ'S BUILDING was of sharp-edged sandstone, six stories with tall casements and ornate cast-iron balconies. From the top floor came a blast of hot jazz, cornet and piano and saxophone dueling just beyond the blazing windows. Andras went to the door to ring the bell, but the door had been propped open; in the vestibule a cluster of girls in close-fitting silk dresses stood drinking champagne and smoking violet-scented cigarettes. They gave him hardly a glance as he dragged his luggage inside and pushed it against the wall. With his heart in his throat he stepped forward to touch one of the girls on the sleeve, and she turned a coy eye toward him and raised a painted brow.

"Jozsef Hasz?" he said.

The girl raised one finger and pointed toward the very top of the oval staircase.

"La-bas,"
she said.
"En haut."

He dragged his luggage and the massive box into the lift, and took it as high as it would go. At the top, he stepped out into a crush of men and women, of smoke and jazz; the entirety of the Latin Quarter, it seemed, had assembled at Jozsef Hasz's. Leaving his luggage in the hall, he stepped in through the open door of the apartment and repeated the question of Hasz's name to a series of drunken revelers. After a labyrinthine tour of high-ceilinged rooms he found himself standing on a balcony with Hasz himself, a tall, loose-limbed young man in a velvet smoking jacket. Hasz's large gray eyes rested on Andras's in an expression of champagne-tinged bemusement, and he asked a question in French and raised his glass.

Andras shook his head. "I'm afraid it's got to be Hungarian for now," he said.

Jozsef squinted at him. "And which Hungarian are you, exactly?"

"Andras Levi. The Hungarian from your mother's telegram."

"What

telegram?"

"Didn't your mother send a telegram?"

"Oh, God, that's right! Ingrid said there was a telegram." Jozsef put a hand on Andras's shoulder, then leaned in through the door of the balcony and shouted, "Ingrid!"

A blond girl in a spangled leotard pushed out onto the balcony and stood with one hand on her hip. A rapid French exchange ensued, after which Ingrid produced from her bosom a folded telegram envelope. Jozsef extracted the slip, read it, looked at Andras, read it again, and fell into a paroxysm of laughter.

"You poor man!" Jozsef said. "I was supposed to meet you at the station two hours ago!"

"Yes, that was the idea."

"You must have wanted to kill me!"

"I might still," Andras said. His head was throbbing in time with the music, his eyes watering, his insides twisting with hunger. It was clear to him he couldn't stay at Jozsef Hasz's, but he could hardly imagine venturing out now to find another place to spend the night.

"Well, you've done well enough without me so far," Jozsef said. "Here you are at my place, where there's enough champagne to last us all night, and plenty of whatever else you like, if you take my meaning."

"All I need is a quiet corner to sleep in. Give me a blanket and put me anywhere."

"I'm afraid there's no quiet corner here," Jozsef said. "You'll have to have a drink instead. Ingrid will get you one. Follow me." He pulled Andras into the apartment and placed him under the care of Ingrid, who produced what must have been the last clean champagne flute in the building and poured Andras a tall sparkling glassful. The bottle sufficed for Ingrid herself; she toasted Andras, gave him a long smoky kiss, and pulled him into the front room, where the pianist was faking his way through "Downtown Uproar" and the partygoers had just started to dance.

In the morning he woke on a sofa beneath a window, his eyes draped in a silk chemise, his head a mass of cotton wool, his shirt unbuttoned, his jacket rolled beneath his head, his left arm stinging with pins and needles. Someone had put an eiderdown over him and opened the curtains; a block of sunlight fell across his chest. He stared up at the ceiling, where the floral froth of a plaster medallion curled around the fluted brass base of a light fixture. A knot of gold branches grew downward from the base, bearing small flame-shaped bulbs.
Paris
, he thought, and pushed himself up on his elbows. The room was littered with party detritus and smelled of spilled champagne and wilted roses. He had a vague recollection of a prolonged tete-a-tete with Ingrid, and then of a drinking contest with Jozsef and a broad-shouldered American; after that he could remember nothing at all. His luggage and the crate for Jozsef had been dragged inside and stacked beside the fireplace. Hasz himself was nowhere to be seen. Andras rolled from the sofa and wandered down the hall to a white-tiled bathroom, where he shaved at the basin and bathed in a lion-footed tub that dispensed hot water directly from the tap. Afterward he dressed in his only clean shirt and trousers and jacket. As he was searching for his shoes in the main room, he heard a key in the lock. It was Hasz, carrying a pastry-shop box and a newspaper. He tossed the box on a low table and said, "Up so soon?"

"What's that?" Andras said, eyeing the ribbon-tied box.

"The cure for your hangover."

Andras opened the box to find half a dozen warm pastries nestled in waxed paper.

Until that moment he hadn't allowed himself to realize how desperately hungry he was.

He ate one chocolate croissant and was halfway through another before he thought to offer the box to his host, who refused, laughing.

"I've been up for hours," Jozsef said. "I've already had my breakfast and read the news. Spain's a wreck. France still won't send troops. But there are two new beauty queens competing for the title of Miss Europe: the dark and lovely Mademoiselle de Los Reyes of Spain, and the mysterious Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia." He tossed the newspaper to Andras. Two sleek ice-cold beauties in white evening gowns gazed from their photographs on the front page.

"I like de Los Reyes," Andras said. "Those lips."

"She looks like a Nationalist," Jozsef said. "I like the other." He loosened his orange silk scarf and sat back on the sofa, spreading his arms across its curving back.