The InvisibleBridge

by Julie Orringer

  “Attention,” he bellowed.

  The students fell silent and came to attention, their backs straightening as if they had been pulled by invisible strings. Quietly, a tall young man in a frayed work shirt slid onto the bench beside Andras and bent his head toward Andras’s ear.

  “That’s Auguste Perret,” the young man said in Hungarian. “He was my teacher, and now he’ll be yours.”

  Andras looked at the young man in surprise and relief. “You’re the one who wrote the note in my packet,” he said.

  “Listen,” the man said, “and I’ll translate.”

  Andras listened. At the lectern, Auguste Perret lifted the jagged rock in both hands and asked a question. The question, according to Andras’s translator, was whether anyone knew what this building material was. You there, in front? Concrete, that was correct. Reinforced concrete. By the time they finished their five years at the school, all of them would know everything there was to know about reinforced concrete. Why? Because it was the future of the modern city. It would make buildings that surpassed in height and strength anything that had been built before. Height and strength, yes; and beauty. Here at the École Spéciale we were not seduced by beauty, however; leave that to the sons of privilege at that other school. That school was a gentlemen’s institution, a place where boys went to play at the art of dessinage; we at the École Spéciale were interested in real architecture, buildings that people could inhabit. If our designs were beautiful, so much the better; but let them be beautiful in a manner that belonged to the common man. We were here because we believed in architecture as a democratic art; because we believed that form and function were of equal importance; because we, the avantgarde, had shrugged off the bonds of aristocratic tradition and had begun to think for ourselves. Let anyone who wanted to build Versailles stand now and go through that gate. That other school was only three Métro stops away.

  The professor paused, his arm flung toward the gate, his eyes fixed on the rows of students. “Non?” he shouted. “Pas un?”

  No one moved. The professor stood statuelike before them. Andras had the sense of being a figure in a painting, paralyzed for all eternity by Perret’s challenge. People would admire the painting in museums centuries from now. Still he would be sitting on the bench, inclined slightly toward this man with the cape and the white beard, this general among architects.

  “He gives this speech every year,” the Hungarian man next to Andras whispered. “Next he’ll talk about your responsibility to the students who will come after you.”

  “Les étudiants qui viennent après vous,” the professor went on, and the Hungarian translated. Those students were relying upon you to study assiduously. If you did not, they, too, would fail. You would be taught by those who came before you; at the École Spéciale you would learn collaboration, because your life as an architect would involve close work with others. You might have your own vision, but without the help of your colleagues that vision wasn’t worth the paper it was drawn upon. In this school, Emile Trélat had instructed Robert Mallet-Stevens, Mallet-Stevens had instructed Fernand Fenzy, Fernand Fenzy had instructed Pierre Vago, and Pierre Vago would instruct you.

  At that, the professor pointed into the audience, and the young man beside Andras stood up and made a polite bow. He strode to the front of the assembly, took his place beside Professor Perret at the lectern, and began addressing the students in French. Pierre Vago. This man who had been translating for Andras-this rumpled-looking young man in an inkstained work shirt-was the P. VAGO of Andras’s class schedule. His studio leader. His professor. A Hungarian. Andras felt suddenly faint. For the first time it seemed to him he might have a chance of surviving at the École Spéciale. He could hardly concentrate on what Pierre Vago was saying now, in his elegant, slightly accented French. Pierre Vago had indeed been the one who’d written the Hungarian note in Andras’s manila envelope. Pierre Vago, it occurred to Andras, was probably the one man responsible for his being there at all.

  “Hey,” Rosen said, pulling Andras’s sleeve. “Regardes-toi.”

  In the excitement, Andras’s nose had begun to bleed. Red spots glistened on his white shirt. Polaner looked at him with concern and offered a handkerchief; Ben Yakov went pale and turned away. Andras took the handkerchief and pressed it against his nose. Rosen made him tip his head back. A few people turned to see what was going on. Andras sat bleeding into the handkerchief, not caring who was looking, happier than he’d ever been in his life.

  Later that day, after the assembly, after Andras’s nosebleed had stopped and he’d traded his own clean handkerchief for the one he’d bled upon, after the first meeting of the studio groups, and after he’d exchanged addresses with Rosen, Polaner, and Ben Yakov, Andras found himself in Vago’s cluttered office, sitting on a wooden stool beside the drafting table. On the walls were sketched and printed plans, black-and-white watercolors of beautiful and impossible buildings, a scale drawing of a city from high above. In one corner was a heap of paint-stained clothes; a rusted, twisted bicycle frame leaned against the wall. Vago’s bookshelves held ancient books and glossy magazines and a teakettle and a small wooden airplane and a skinny-legged junk sculpture of a girl. Vago himself leaned back in his swivel chair, his fingers laced behind his head.

  “So,” he said to Andras. “Here you are, fresh from Budapest. I’m glad you came. I didn’t know if you’d be able to make it on such short notice. But I had to try. It’s barbarous, those prejudices about who can study what, and when, and how. It’s not a country for men like us.”

  “But-forgive me-are you Jewish, Professor?”

  “No. I’m a Catholic. Educated in Rome.” He gave his R a deep Italianate roll.

  “Then why do you care, sir?”

  “Shouldn’t I care?”

  “Many don’t.”

  Vago shrugged. “Some do.” He opened a folder on his desk. There, in full color, were reproductions of Andras’s covers for Past and Future: linoleum prints of a scribe inking a scroll, a father and his boys at synagogue, a woman lighting two slender candles. Andras saw the work now as if for the first time. The subjects seemed sentimental, the compositions obvious and childish. He couldn’t believe this was what had earned his admission to the school. He hadn’t had a chance to submit the portfolio he’d used for his applications to Hungarian architectural colleges-detailed drawings of the Parliament and the Palace, measured renderings of the interiors of churches and libraries, work he’d slaved over for hours at his desk at Past and Future. But he suspected that even those pieces would have seemed clumsy and amateurish in comparison to Vago’s work, the crisp plans and gorgeous elevations pinned to the walls.

  “I’m here to learn, sir,” Andras said. “I made those prints a long time ago.”

  “This is excellent work,” Vago said. “There’s a precision, an accuracy of perspective, rare in an untrained artist. You’ve got great natural skill, that’s apparent. The compositions are asymmetrical but well balanced. The themes are ancient but the lines are modern. Good qualities to bring to your work in architecture.”

  Andras reached for one of the covers, the one that showed a man and boys at prayer. He’d carved the linoleum original by candlelight in the apartment on Hársfa utca. Though he hadn’t considered it at the time-and why not, when it was so clear now?-this man in the tallis was his father, the boys his brothers.

  “It’s fine work,” Vago said. “I wasn’t the only one who thought so.”

  “It’s not architecture,” Andras said, and handed the cover back to Vago.

  “You’ll learn architecture. And in the meantime you’ll study French. There’s no other way to survive here. I can help you, but I can’t translate for you in every class. So you will come here every morning, an hour before studio, and practice your French with me.”

  “Here with you, sir?”

  “Yes. From now on we will speak only French. I’ll teach you all I know. And for God’s sake, you will cease to call me ‘sir,’
as if I were an army officer.” His eyes assumed a serious expression, but he twisted his mouth to the left in a French-looking moue. “L’architecture n’est pas un jeu d’enfants,” he said in a deep, resonant voice that matched exactly, both in pitch and tone, the voice of Professor Perret. “L’architecture, c’est l’art le plus sériuex de tous.”

  “L’art le plus sérieux de tous,” Andras repeated in the same deep tone.

  “Non, non!” Vago cried. “Only I am permitted the voice of Monsieur le Directeur. You will please speak in the manner of Andras the lowly student. My name is Andras the Lowly Student,” Vago said in French. “If you please: repeat.”

  “My name is Andras the Lowly Student.”

  “I shall learn to speak perfect French from Monsieur Vago.”

  “I shall learn to speak perfect French from Monsieur Vago.”

  “I will repeat everything he says.”

  “I will repeat everything he says.”

  “Though not in the voice of Monsieur le Directeur.”

  “Though not in the voice of Monsieur le Directeur.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” Vago said in Hungarian now, his expression earnest. “Have I done the right thing by bringing you here? Are you terribly lonely? Is this all overwhelming?”

  “It is overwhelming,” Andras said. “But I find I’m strangely happy.”

  “I was miserable when I first got here,” Vago said, settling back in his chair. “I came three weeks after I finished school in Rome, and started at the Beaux-Arts. That school was no place for a person of my temperament. Those first few months were awful! I hated Paris with a passion.” He looked out the office window at the chill gray afternoon. “I walked around every day, taking it all in-the Bastille and the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, Notre-Dame, the Opéra-and cursing every stick and stone of it. After a while I transferred to the École Spéciale. That was when I began to fall in love with Paris. Now I can’t imagine living anyplace else. After a time, you’ll feel that way too.”

  “I’m beginning to feel that way already.”

  “Just wait,” Vago said, and grinned. “It only gets worse.”

  In the mornings he bought his bread at the small boulangerie near his building, and his newspaper from a stand on the corner; when he dropped his coins into the proprietor’s hand, the man would sing a throaty Merci. Back at his apartment he would eat his croissant and drink sweet tea from the empty jam jar. He would look at the photographs in the paper and try to follow the news of the Spanish Civil War, in which the Front Populaire was losing ground now against the Nationalistes. He wouldn’t allow himself to buy a Hungarian expatriate paper to fill in the blanks; the urgency of the news itself eased the effort of translation. Every day came stories of new atrocities: teenaged boys shot in ditches, elderly gentlemen bayoneted in olive orchards, villages firebombed from the air. Italy accused France of violating its own arms embargo; large shipments of Soviet munitions were reaching the Republican army. On the other side, Germany had increased the numbers of its Condor Legion to ten thousand men. Andras read the news with increasing despair, jealous at times of the young men who had run away to fight for the Republican army. Everyone was involved now, he knew; any other view was denial.

  With his mind full of horrific images of the Spanish front, he would walk the leaf-littered sidewalks toward the École Spéciale, distracting himself by repeating French architectural terms: toit, fenêtre, porte, mur, corniche, balcon, balustrade, souche de cheminée. At school he learned the difference between stereobate and stylobate, base and entablature; he learned which of his professors secretly preferred the decorative to the practical, and which were adherents to Perret’s cult of reinforced concrete. With his statics class he visited the Sainte-Chapelle, where he learned how thirteenth-century engineers had discovered a way to strengthen the building using iron struts and metal supports; the supports were hidden within the framework of the stained-glass windows that spanned the height of the chapel. As morning light fell in red and blue strands through the glass, he stood at the center of the nave and experienced a kind of holy exaltation. No matter that this was a Catholic church, that its windows depicted Christ and a host of saints. What he felt had less to do with religion than with a sense of harmonious design, the perfect meeting of form and function in that structure. One long vertical space meant to suggest a path to God, or toward a deeper knowledge of the mysteries. Architects had done this, hundreds of years ago.

  Pierre Vago, true to his word, tutored Andras every morning for an hour. The French he’d learned at school returned with speed, and within a month he had absorbed far more than he’d ever learned from his master at gimnázium. By mid-October the lessons were nothing more than long conversations; Vago had a talent for finding the subjects that would make Andras talk. He asked Andras about his years in Konyár and Debrecen -what he had studied, what his friends had been like, where he had lived, whom he’d loved. Andras told Vago about Éva Kereny, the girl who had kissed him in the garden of the Déri Museum in Debrecen and then spurned him coldheartedly; he told the story of his mother’s only pair of silk stockings, a Chanukah gift bought with money Andras had earned by taking on his fellow students’ drawing assignments. (The brothers had all been competing to get her the best gift; she’d reacted with such childlike joy when she’d seen the stockings that no one could dispute Andras’s victory. Later that night, Tibor sat on Andras in the yard and mashed his face into the frozen ground, exacting an older brother’s revenge.) Vago, who had no siblings of his own, seemed to like hearing about Mátyás and Tibor; he made Andras recite their histories and translate their letters into French. In particular he took an interest in Tibor’s desire to study medicine in Italy. He had known a young man in Rome whose father had been a professor of medicine at the school in Modena; he would write a few letters, he said, and would see what could be done.

  Andras didn’t think much about it when he said it; he knew Vago was busy, and that the international post traveled slowly, and that the gentleman in Rome might not share Vago’s ideas about educating young Hungarian-Jewish men. But one morning Vago met Andras with a letter in hand: He had received word that Professor Turano might be able to arrange for Tibor to matriculate in January.

  “My God!” Andras said. “That’s miraculous! How did you do it?”

  “I correctly estimated the value of my connections,” Vago said, and smiled.

  “I’ve got to wire Tibor right away. Where do I go to send a telegram?”

  Vago put up a hand in caution. “I wouldn’t send word just yet,” he said. “It’s still just a possibility. We wouldn’t want to raise his hopes in vain.”

  “What are the chances, do you think? What does the professor say?”

  “He says he’ll have to petition the admissions board. It’s a special case.”

  “You’ll tell me as soon as you hear from him?”

  “Of course,” Vago said.

  But he had to share the preliminary good news with someone, so he told Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov that night at their student dining club on the rue des Écoles. It was the same club József had recommended when Andras had arrived. For 125 francs a week they received daily dinners that relied heavily upon potatoes and beans and cabbage; they ate in an echoing underground cavern at long tables inscribed with thousands of students’ names. Andras delivered the news about Tibor in his Hungarian-accented French, struggling to be heard above the din. The others raised their glasses and wished Tibor luck.

  “What a delicious irony,” Rosen said, once they’d drained their glasses. “Because he’s a Jew, he has to leave a constitutional monarchy to study medicine in a fascist dictatorship. At least he doesn’t have to join us in this fine democracy, where intelligent young men practice the right of free speech with such abandon.” He cut his eyes at Polaner, who looked down at his neat white hands.

  “What’s that about?” Ben Yakov said.

  “Nothing,” Polaner said.

  “Wh
at happened?” asked Ben Yakov, who could not stand to be left out of gossip.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” Rosen said. “On the way to school yesterday, Polaner’s portfolio handle broke. We had to stop and fix it with a bit of twine. We were late to morning lecture, as you’ll recall-that was us, coming in at half past ten. We had to sit in the back, next to that second-year, Lemarque-that blond bastard, the snide one from studio. Tell them, Polaner, what he said when we slid into the row.”

  Polaner laid his spoon beside the soup bowl. “What you thought he said.”

  “He said filthy Jews. I heard it, plain as day.”

  Ben Yakov looked at Polaner. “Is that true?”

  “I don’t know,” Polaner said. “He said something, but I didn’t hear what.”

  “We both heard it. Everyone around us did.”

  “You’re paranoid,” Polaner said, the delicate skin around his eyes flushing red. “People turned around because we were late, not because he’d called us filthy Jews.”

  “Maybe it’s all right where you come from, but it’s not all right here,” Rosen said.

  “I’m not going to talk about it.”

  “Anyway, what can you do?” said Ben Yakov. “Certain people will always be idiots.”

  “Teach him a lesson,” Rosen said. “That’s what.”

  “No,” Polaner said. “I don’t want trouble over something that may or may not have happened. I just want to keep my head down. I want to study and get my degree. Do you understand?”

  Andras did. He remembered that feeling from primary school in Konyár, the desire to become invisible. But he hadn’t anticipated that he or any of his Jewish classmates would feel it in Paris. “I understand,” he said. “Still, Lemarque shouldn’t feel”-he struggled to find the French words-“like he can get away with saying a thing like that. If he did say it, that is.”