The Invisible Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page A

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