The InvisibleBridge

He found himself in such an expansive mood, once he’d received the praise of the minister of culture after the show and had passed his compliments along to the blushing, breathless Marcelle Gérard, that he accepted and drank two glasses of champagne, one after the other, there in the dressing-room hallway. Before he left, Marcelle called him into her i

“What were you thinking, coming up behind someone like that?” Novak said in Hungarian, trying to get a better look at the boy’s face.

“You wouldn’t see me in your office,” the young man managed to say.

“Should I have seen you?” Novak said. “Do I know you?”

“Andras Lévi,” the young man gasped.

Undrash Lévi. The boy from the train. He remembered Andras’s bewilderment in Vie

“Thanks ever so much,” the young man said bitterly, still nursing his rib.

“I knocked you clear into the gutter,” Novak said in dismay.

“I’ll be all right.”

“Why don’t you walk with me awhile? I don’t live far from here.”

So they walked together and Andras told him the whole story, begi

By that time, they’d reached Novak’s building in the rue de Sèvres. Upstairs, light radiated from behind the scrim of the bedroom curtains. The falling mist had dampened Novak’s hair and beaded on the sleeves of his overcoat; beside him, Lévi shivered in a thin jacket. Novak found himself thinking of the ledger he’d closed just before he’d gone up to see the show. There, in the accountant’s neat red lettering, were the figures that attested to the Sarah-Bernhardt’s dire state; another few losing weeks and they would have to close. On the other hand, with Marcelle Gérard in the role of the Mother, who knew what might happen? He knew what was going on in Eastern Europe, that the drying up of Andras’s funds was only a symptom of a more serious disease. In Hungary, in his youth, he’d seen brilliant Jewish boys defeated by the numerus clausus; it seemed a crime that this young man should have to bend, too, after having come all this way. The Bernhardt was not a philanthropic organization, but the boy wasn’t asking for a handout. 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 Lévi,” 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 Lévi, Novak didn’t want to know.

CHAPTER SIX. Work

THE MOTHER 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 di

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 frisé 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 Gérard 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 Gérard who lingered. At the end of the evening he stood outside her dressing room, waiting for her to finish talking to Zoltán Novak. He could hear the thrill in Madame Gérard’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 di

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

Madame Gérard 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 Gérard 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 Gérard 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.