The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
"She knows," Ben Yakov said, once Klara had disappeared around the corner.
"Knows
what?"
"She knows how I felt about the baby."
"What makes you say that?"
"She would hardly look at me."
"You're imagining things," Andras said. "I know she thinks well of you."
"Well, she shouldn't." He pressed his fingers against his temples.
"It's not your fault," Andras said. "No one thinks it is."
"What if I think it is?"
"It's still not."
"What
if
she thinks it is? Ilana, I mean?"
"It's still not. And anyway, she won't think so."
After the doctor had finished, a pair of orderlies wheeled Ilana out on a gurney and brought her to a ward, where they transferred her to a hospital bed. Andras and Ben Yakov stood beside the bed and watched her sleep. Her skin was wax-white from the loss of blood, her dark hair pushed back from her forehead.
"I think I'm going to faint," Ben Yakov said.
"You'd better sit down," Andras said. "Do you want some water?"
"I don't want to sit down. I've been sitting for hours."
"Take a walk, then. Get some air."
"I'm hardly dressed for it."
"Go ahead. It'll do you good."
"All right. You'll stay here with her?"
He promised he wouldn't move.
"I'll just be a minute," Ben Yakov said. He tucked his pajama shirt into his trousers, then went off down the long avenue of beds. Just as he disappeared through the door of the ward, Ilana gave a rising cry of pain and shifted her hips beneath the sheet.
Andras glanced around for a nurse. Three beds away, a silver-haired woman in a crisp cap ministered to another deathly pale girl. "S'il vous plait," Andras called.
The nurse came to examine Ilana. She took her pulse and glanced at the chart at the end of the bed. "One moment," she said, and ran down the ward; she returned a minute later with a syringe and a vial. Ilana opened her eyes and looked around in a daze of pain. She seemed to be searching for something. When her gaze fell upon Andras, her focus sharpened and her forehead relaxed. A faint flush came to her lips.
"It's you," she said in Italian. "You came all the way from Modena."
"It's Andras," he told her. "You're going to be all right."
The nurse uncovered Ilana's shoulder and swabbed it with alcohol. "I'm giving her morphine for the pain," she said. "She'll feel better in a moment."
Ilana drew a sharp breath as the needle went in. "Tibor," she said, turning her eyes again toward Andras. Then the morphine found its mark, and her eyelids fluttered and closed.
"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, Hofeherke--in French it must be Blanche-Neige--the exiled princess sleeping in her glass coffin on a hill, while those little men, the torpek, 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 Ecoles, 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 Cote 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 Matyas 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 thr
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.
"Rubbish!" Pingusson shouted. "How dare you accuse me of chauvinism? When you dismiss this choice as kitsch, are you not entirely disregarding the tradition of feminine power in classical mythology?"
"A fine point," Lemain said. "And since you're both so enlightened, gentlemen, why not let the women defend the choice themselves?"
The taller of the student architects--Marie-Laure was her name--began to explain in a neat, clipped French that these were no ordinary caryatids; they were modeled after Suzanne Lenglen, the recently deceased French tennis champion. She went on to defend other features of the design, but Andras lost the thread of the argument. He and Polaner would be critiqued next, and he was too nervous to concentrate on anything but that.
Polaner stood beside him, crushing his handkerchief into a dense ball; on his other side was Rosen, who wore a look of vaguely interested detachment. He didn't have to worry; he hadn't entered the contest. He'd been too busy with meetings of the Ligue Contre l'Antisemitisme, of which he had recently been elected secretary.
Far too soon for Andras's comfort, the critique of the women's sports club concluded and the judges moved on. The students collected behind them around the table where Andras and Polaner's model was displayed.
"Introduce your project, gentlemen," Perret said, with a wave of his hand.
Polaner was the first to speak. He tugged at the hem of his jacket, and, in his Polish-tinged French, began to explain the need for an inclusive sports club, one that would stand as a symbol of the founding principles of the Republic. The design would be oriented toward the future; the building's predominant materials would be reinforced concrete, glass, and steel, with panels of dark wood crowning the doors and windows.
He paused and looked at Andras, who was to speak next. Andras opened his mouth and found that his French had fled entirely. In its place there was an astounding blankness, a book washed clean of text.
"What's the matter, young man?" Le Corbusier said. "Can't you speak?"
Andras, who hadn't slept in three days, was afflicted with a temporal hallucination. Time slowed to a chelonian crawl. He watched the cycle of Le Corbusier's blink, taking place over what seemed an eternity, behind the plaster-flecked lenses of his glasses. From the back of the amphitheater someone launched an oceanic cough.
He might never have found his voice had not Pierre Vago, Master of Ceremonies, come swiftly to his rescue. Vago was the one who had taught Andras the language he was supposed to speak now; he knew the words that might put Andras at ease. "Why don't you begin with the piste," he said. Piste: the running track, French for palya. They'd had the conversation two days ago in studio: how one said sports track in French, and how that word differed from the ones that meant road, trail, rail, and trace. Andras could talk about the piste; it was the most unusual element of their design, a stroke of recent late-night inspiration. "La piste," he began, "est construit d'acier galvanisee," and would be suspended from the roof of the building, halolike, on steel cables attached to reinforced I-beams. The words had come back to him; he spoke them, and Le Corbusier and Lemain and Pingusson listened, making notes on their yellow pads. The suspension design allowed for a longer track than would be possible if the piste were housed inside the building. The sports club would be constructed higher than the surrounding buildings, and the track could hang over their uppermost stories. The roof of the building itself was also the ceiling of the natatorium; Andras bent over the model and demonstrated how it might be retracted in fine weather. Both design elements, the exposed track and the retractable roof, reflected the sports club's principles of inclusivity and freedom.
When he'd finished, there was a hush in the room. He sent a look of gratitude in the direction of Professor Vago, who refused to acknowledge that he had helped Andras.
Then the judges' questions began: How would a suspended track be kept from bouncing under the runners' impact? What would happen in a wind? How quickly could the retracted roof be closed again in case of thunderstorms? How did they propose to deal with the problem of housing a hydraulic system in the open space of the natatorium?
Now the words came faster. These were problems Andras and Polaner had discussed and argued about for hours in the studio at night. The supporting cables would be wrapped in thin bands of steel to make them rigid without entirely eliminating their elasticity; a certain degree of spring would cushion the runners' tread. The track would be braced against the building with support struts to prevent sway. And the hydraulic system would be housed within this closetlike enclosure. After they'd answered all the questions, it seemed to take hours for Pingusson and Lemain and Le Corbusier to inspect the materials and make their notes; even Perret himself insisted upon taking a closer look, muttering to himself as he examined the cross-section of an external wall.
"And who are you, Monsieur Levi?" Le Corbusier asked finally, lodging his pencil behind his ear.
"I'm a Hungarian, from Konyar, sir," Andras said.
"Ah. You're the young man they discovered at the art exhibition. They admitted you to the school based on some linoleum cuts, I understand."
"Yes," Andras said, and cleared his throat self-consciously.
"And you, Monsieur Polaner?" Pingusson asked. "From Krakow? They tell me you've got a taste for engineering."
"I do, sir," Polaner said.
"Well, I'd call the design superb but impractical," Le Corbusier said. "The zoning is the problem. You'll never get Parisians to hang a track off a building. It looks a bit like what ladies used to wear under their dresses in the eighteenth century. Those whatever-you-call-them. Martingale. Frimple."
"More like some sort of outlandish hat," said Pingusson. "But it's an awfully good use of urban space."
"Rather fantastical," Lemain said. "The building itself is well designed, though.
And the wood ornamentation is a fine element. Echoes of gymnasium parquet."
And then the
"Congratulations, boys," he said. "You've created the first ever architectural frimple. If I weren't entirely broke, I'd treat you both to a drink."
The next morning, when Andras came in through the blue courtyard doors--the same threshold he'd crossed nearly two years earlier as a novice student--he was greeted by cheers all around. The students in the courtyard clapped and began to chant his name.