“What do you think they’re planning, anyway?” Polaner said, beginning to grow angry. “It’s not as though they’re going to mount a pogrom in Paris.”
“Why not?” Rosen said. “Do you think they haven’t considered it?”
“Can we talk about something else, please?” Ben Yakov said.
Rosen pushed his coffee cup away. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Why don’t you tell us about your latest conquest? What could possibly be more important or more urgent?”
Ben Yakov laughed off Rosen’s slight, which infuriated Rosen all the more. He stood and threw money on the table, then slung his coat over his shoulder and made for the exit. Andras grabbed his own hat and followed; he hated to see a friend leave in anger. He caught up with Rosen on the corner of Saint-Germain and Saint-Jacques, and they stood together on the corner and waited for the light to change.
“You don’t think I’m speaking nonsense, do you?” Rosen said, his hands deep in his pockets, his eyes fixed on Andras.
“No,” Andras began, trying to find the words in French for what he wanted to say. “You’re just trying to think a few chess moves ahead.”
“Oh,” said Rosen, brightening. “Are you a chess player?”
“My brothers and I used to play. I wasn’t very good. My older brother mastered a book of defenses by a Russian champion. I couldn’t do a thing against him.”
“Couldn’t you read the book yourself?” Rosen said, and grinned.
“Maybe if he hadn’t hidden it so well!”
“I suppose that’s all I’m doing, then. Trying to find the book.”
“You won’t have to look very hard,” Andras said. “There are posters for those Front de la Jeunesse meetings all over the Latin Quarter.”
They had reached the Petit Pont at the foot of rue Saint-Jacques, and they crossed it together in the twilight. The towers of Notre-Dame caught the last rays of the setting sun as they entered the Square Charlemagne and walked toward the cathedral. They stopped to look at the grim saints who flanked the portals, one of whom held his own severed head in his hand.
“Do you know what I want to do when I grow up?” Rosen said.
“No,” Andras said. “What?”
“Move to Palestine. Build a temple of Jerusalem stone.” He paused and looked at Andras as if daring him to laugh, but Andras wasn’t laughing. He was thinking of some photographs of Jerusalem that had been printed in Past and Future. The buildings had a kind of geologic permanence, as if they hadn’t been made by human hands at all. Even in the black-and-white photos their stones seemed to radiate gold light.
“I want to make a city in the desert,” Rosen said. “A new city where an old one used to be. In the shape of the ancient city, but composed of all-knew buildings. Perret’s reinforced concrete is perfect for Palestine. Cheap and light, cool in the heat, ready to take on any shape.” He seemed to be seeing it in the distance as he spoke, a city in the rippling dunes.
“So you’re a dreamer,” Andras said. “I never would have guessed.”
Rosen smirked and said, “Don’t let the others know.” They looked up again at the tops of the towers as the line of gold narrowed to a filament. “You’ll do it, won’t you?” he said. “Come to one of these Jeunesse meetings? Then we’ll see what they’re plotting.”
Andras hesitated. He tried to imagine what Madame Morgenstern might think of an act like that, an infiltration. He envisioned narrating it to her on one of their Sunday afternoons: his daring, his bravery. His foolishness? “And what if someone does recognize us?” he said.
“They won’t,” Rosen said. “They won’t be looking for us among them.”
“When do they meet?”
“That’s my good man, Lévi,” Rosen said.
They decided to infiltrate a recruitment session for Le Grand Occident, reasoning that the meeting would be full of unfamiliar faces. It was to take place that Saturday at an assembly hall on rue de l’Université in Saint-Germain. But first there were the end-of-term critiques to get through. Andras had finished his Gare d’Orsay at last, staying up two nights straight to do it; on Friday morning it stood white and inviolate on its pasteboard base. He knew it was good work, the product of long study, of many hours of painstaking measurement and construction. Rosen and Ben Yakov and Polaner had put in their time, too, and there on the studio tables stood their ghost-white versions of the École Militaire, the Rotonde de la Villette, and the Théâtre de l’Odeon. They were to be evaluated in turn by their peers, by their second- and third- and fourth-year superiors, by their fifth-year studio monitor, Médard, and finally by Vago himself. Andras thought himself seasoned by the relentless friendly criticism of his editor at Past and Future; he’d had some critiques earlier that fall, none of them as bad as what his editor had regularly delivered.
But when the critique of his d’Orsay began, the commentary took a savage turn almost at once. His lines were imprecise, his methods of construction amateurish; he had made no attempt whatever to replicate the building’s front expanse of glass or to capture what was most striking about the design-the way the Seine, which flowed in front of the station, threw light against its high reflective façade. He’d made a dead model, one fourth-year student said. A shoebox. A coffin. Even Vago, who knew better than anyone how hard Andras had worked, criticized the model’s lifelessness. In his paint-flecked work shirt and an incongruously fine vest, he stood over the model and gazed at it with undisguised disappointment. He drew a mechanical pencil from his pocket and tapped its metal end against his lip.
“A dutiful reproduction,” he said. “Like a Chopin polonaise played at a student recital. You’ve hit all the notes, to be sure, but you’ve done so entirely without artistry.”
And that was all. He turned away and moved on to the next model, and Andras fell into an oubliette of humiliation and misery. Vago was right: He had replicated the building without inspiration; how had he ever seen the model otherwise? It was little consolation that the other first-year students fared just as badly. He couldn’t believe how confident he’d been half an hour earlier, how certain that everyone in the room would proclaim his work evidence of what a fine architect he would turn out to be.
He knew that the school had a tradition of difficult end-of-term critiques, that few first-year students survived with pride intact. It was the school’s version of an initiation ritual, an annealing that prepared the students for the deeper and more subtle humiliations that would occur when the work under discussion was of their own design. But this critique had been much harsher than he’d imagined-and, what was worse, the comments had seemed justified. He’d worked as hard as he could and it hadn’t been enough, not nearly, not by miles. And his humiliation was linked, in a way he found it impossible to articulate, to the idea of Madame Morgenstern and his relation to her-as though by building a fine replica of the Gare d’Orsay he might have had greater claim upon her affections. Now he couldn’t give her an honest account of the day’s events without revealing himself to be a prideful fool. He left the École Spéciale in a vile mood, a mood tenacious enough to stay with him through the night and the next morning; it was still with him when he went to meet Rosen for their infiltration.
The meeting hall was just around the corner from the palatial Beaux-Arts, a few blocks east of the Gare d’Orsay. Andras didn’t ever want to see that building again. He knew that the critiques he’d received had been accurate; in his zeal to replicate each detail of the building he had failed to grasp its whole, to understand what made the design distinct and alive. This was a classic first-year mistake, Vago had told him on his way out. But if that were the case, why hadn’t Vago cautioned him against it when he’d started? Rosen, too, now claimed a towering hatred for the subject of his model, the École Militaire. They scowled at the sidewalk in companionate symmetry as they made their way down the rue de l’Université.
Since the meeting they were attending was just a recruitment session, there was no need for secrecy or disguise;
they arrived with the rest of the attendees, most of whom looked to be students. At a lectern on a low stage at the front of the room, a whip-thin man in an ill-fitting gray suit declared himself to be Monsieur Dupuis, “Secretary to President Pemjean himself,” and clapped his hands for order. The gathering fell silent. Volunteers walked along the aisles, handing out special supplementary sections of a newspaper entitled Le Grand Occident. The Secretary to President Pemjean Himself announced that this supplement set forth the beliefs of the organization, which the governing members would now read aloud to the assembly. A half-dozen grim-looking young fellows gathered on the stage, their copies of the supplement in hand. One by one they read that Jews must be removed from positions of influence in France, and that they should cease to exercise authority over Frenchmen; that Jewish organizations in France must be dissolved, because, while masquerading shamelessly as Jewish welfare agencies, they were working to achieve global domination; that the rights of French citizenship must be taken away from all Jews, who must henceforth be regarded as foreigners-even those whose families had been settled in France for generations; and that all Jewish goods and belongings should become the property of the state.
As each of the tenets was read, there were brief cracklings of applause. Some of the assembled men shouted their approval, and others raised their fists. Still others seemed to disagree, and a few began to argue with the supporters.
“What about the Jews whose brothers or fathers died for France in the Great War?” someone shouted from the balcony.
“Those Zionists died for their own glory, not for the glory of France,” the Secretary to the President Himself called back. “Israelites can’t be trusted to serve France. They must be forbidden to bear arms.”
“Why not let them die, if someone has to die?” another man called.
Rosen curled his hands around the back of the seat in front of him, his knuckles going white. Andras didn’t know what he would do if Rosen started shouting.
“You’re here because you believe in the need for a pure France, for the France our fathers and grandfathers built,” the Secretary to the President continued. “You’re here to lend your strength to the cleansing of France. If you’re not here for that purpose, please depart. We need only the most patriotic, the most true-hearted among you.” The Secretary waited. There was a quiet rumble among the assembly. One of the six young men who had read the tenets shouted, “Vive la France!”
“You will become part of an international alliance-” the Secretary began, but his words disappeared under a sudden staccato din, a wooden clapclacking that rendered his words unintelligible. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the noise ceased. The Secretary cleared his throat, straightened his lapels, and began again. “You will become part-”
This time the noise was even louder than before. It came from every part of the hall. Certain members of the audience had gotten to their feet and were spinning wooden noisemakers on sticks. As before, after a few moments of loud hard clatter, they stopped.
“I welcome your enthusiasm, gentlemen,” the Secretary continued. “But, if you please, wait until-”
The noise exploded again, and his time it did not cease. The men with noisemakers-there were perhaps twenty or thirty of them among the assembly-pushed into the aisles and spun their instruments as hard and as loud as they could. These were Purim noisemakers, Andras saw now-the wooden graggers used at synagogue during the reading of the story of Esther, whenever the villain Haman’s name occurred in the text. He glanced at Rosen, who had understood, too. The Secretary banged on his lectern. The six grim-faced men onstage stood at attention, as if awaiting an order from the Secretary. More men pushed out of the rows and into the aisles, bearing large banners that they unrolled and held high so the audience could see them. Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme, read one. Stop the French Hitlerians, said another. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, read a third. The men holding the banners sent up a cheer, and an angry roar burst from the audience. The thin Secretary to the President flushed a surprising purple. Rosen let out a whoop and pulled Andras into the aisle, and the two of them helped to hoist one of the banners. One member of the Ligue, a tall broad-shouldered man in a tricolor neckerchief, produced a megaphone and began to shout, “Free men of France! Don’t let these bigots poison your minds!”
The Secretary growled an order at the six stern-faced young men, and in another moment all was chaos in the assembly hall. The seats emptied. Some audience members pulled at the banners, others pursued the men with the noisemakers. The six men who had read the beliefs of the organization went after the man with the megaphone, but other men defended him in a ring as he continued to urge Fraternité! Egalité! The Secretary disappeared behind a curtain at the back of the stage. Men shoved Andras from behind, kicked at his knees, elbowed him in the chest. Andras wouldn’t let go of the banner. He raised the pole high and shouted Stop the French Hitlerians. Rosen was no longer at his side; Andras couldn’t see him in the crowd. Someone tried to take the banner and Andras wrestled with the man; someone else grabbed him by the collar, and a blow caught him across the jaw. He stumbled against a column, spat blood onto the floor. All around him, men shouted and fought. He shoved his way toward an exit, feeling his teeth with his tongue and wondering if he’d have to see a dentist. In the vestibule he found Rosen grappling with a massive bald man in work overalls. As though he meant to fight Rosen himself, Andras caught him around the waist and wrenched him away, sending Rosen shoulder-first into a wall. The man in overalls, finding his arms empty, charged back into the fray of the auditorium. Andras and Rosen staggered out of the building, past streams of policemen who were rushing up the steps to break up the riot. When they’d gotten clear of the crowd, they tore down the rue de Solférino, all the way to the quai d’Orsay, where they cast themselves down on a pair of benches and lay panting.
“So we weren’t the only ones!” Rosen said, touching his ribs with his fingertips. Andras felt the inside of his lip with his tongue. His cheek still bled where his teeth had cut it, but the teeth were intact. At the sound of quick footsteps he looked up to see three members of the Ligue running down the street, their banners flapping. Other men chased them. Policemen chased the others.
“I’d love to see the look on that secretary’s face again,” Rosen said.
“You mean the Secretary to the President Himself?”
Rosen put his hands on his knees and laughed. But then an ambulance rushed down the street in the direction of the assembly hall, and a few moments later another followed. Not long afterward, more Ligue members passed; these looked pale and stricken, and they dragged their banners on the sidewalk and held their hats in their hands. Andras and Rosen watched them in silence. Something grave had happened: Someone from the Ligue had been hurt. Andras took off his own hat and held it on his lap, his adrenaline dissolving into hollow dread. Le Grand Occident wasn’t the only group of its kind; there had to be dozens of similar meetings taking place all over Paris that very minute. And if meetings like that were taking place in Paris, then what was going on in the less enlightened cities of Europe? Andras pulled his jacket tighter around himself, beginning to feel the cold again. Rosen got to his feet; he, too, had become quiet and serious.
“Far worse things are going to happen here,” he said. “Wait and see.”
On the rue de Sévigné the next day, Madame Morgenstern and Elisabet sat in silence as Andras described the incidents of the past forty-eight hours. He told them about the critique, and how far his work had fallen in his own estimation; he told them what had happened at the meeting. He produced a clipping from that morning’s L’Oeuvre and read it aloud. The article described the disrupted recruitment session and the melee that followed. Each group blamed the other for initiating the violence: Pemjean took the opportunity to point out the deviousness and belligerence of the Jewish people, and Gérard Lecache, president of the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme, called the incident a manifestati
on of Le Grand Occident’s violent intent. The newspaper abandoned all pretense of journalistic objectivity to praise the Maccabean bravery of the Ligue, and to accuse Le Grand Occident of bigotry, ignorance, and barbarism; two members of the Ligue, it turned out, had been beaten senseless and were now hospitalized at the Hôtel-Dieu.
“You might have been killed!” Elisabet said. Her tone was acidic as usual, but for an instant she gave him a look of what seemed like genuine concern. “What were you thinking? Did you imagine you’d take on all those brutes at once? Thirty of you against two hundred of them?”
“We weren’t part of the plan,” Andras said. “We didn’t know the LICA was going to be there. When they started making noise, we joined in.”
“Ridiculous fools, all of you,” Elisabet said.
Madame Morgenstern fixed her gray eyes upon Andras. “Take care you don’t get in trouble with the police,” she said. “Remember, you’re a guest in France. You don’t want to be deported because of an incident like this.”
“They wouldn’t deport me,” Andras said. “Not for serving the ideals of France.”
“They certainly would,” Madame Morgenstern said. “And that would be the end of your studies. Whatever you do, you must protect your status here. Your presence in France is a political statement to begin with.”
“He’ll never last here, anyway,” Elisabet said, the moment of concern having passed. “He’ll fail out of school by the end of the year. His professors think he’s talentless. Weren’t you listening?” She peeled herself from the velvet chair and slouched off to her bedroom, where they could hear her knocking around as she got ready to go out. A few moments later she emerged in an olive-green dress and a black wool cap. She’d braided her hair and scrubbed her cheeks into a windy redness. Pocketbook in one hand, gloves in the other, she stood in the sitting-room doorway and gave a half wave.
“Don’t wait up for me,” she told her mother. Then, as an apparent afterthought, she arrowed a look of disdain in Andras’s direction. “There’s no need to come next weekend, Champion of France,” she said. “I’ll be skiing with Marthe in Chamonix. In fact, I wish you’d desist altogether.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and ran down the stairs, and they heard the door slam and jingle behind her.
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