Free The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

walked down the boulevard Raspail until he reached a post office, where he asked for a telegraph blank. On the narrow blue lines he wrote the message he'd composed on the way: POSITION SECURED FOR YOU AT MEDICAL COLLEGE M
    ODENA, GRATIAS FRIEND OF V AGO. O BTAIN PASSPORT AND VISAS AT
    ONCE. H URRAH! For a moment, in a fog of self-pity, he considered omitting the H
    URRAH. But at the last moment he included it, paying the extra ten centimes, and then walked out onto the boulevard again. The cars continued to speed by, the afternoon light fell just as it always fell, the pedestrians on the street rushed by with their groceries and drawings and books, all the city insensible to what had just taken place in an office at the Ecole Speciale.

    Unseeing, unthinking, he walked the narrow curve of the rue de Fleurus toward the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he found a green bench in the shade of a plane tree.
    The bench was within sight of the bee farm, and Andras could see the hooded beekeeper checking the layers of a hive. The beekeeper's head and arms and legs were speckled with black bees. Slow-moving, torpid with smoke, they roamed the beekeeper's body like cows grazing a pasture. In school, Andras had learned that there were bees who could change their nature when conditions demanded it. When a queen bee died, another bee could become the queen; that bee would shed its former life, take on a new body, a different role. Now she would lay eggs and converse about the health of the hive with her attendants. He, Andras, had been born a Jew, and had carried the mantle of that identity for twenty-two years. At eight days old he'd been circumcised. In the schoolyard he'd withstood the taunts of Christian children, and in the classroom his teachers' disapproval when he'd had to miss school on Shabbos. On Yom Kippur he'd fasted; on Shabbos he'd gone to synagogue; at thirteen he'd read from the Torah and become a man, according to Jewish law. In Debrecen he went to the Jewish gimnazium, and after he graduated he'd taken a job at a Jewish magazine. He'd lived with Tibor in the Jewish Quarter of Budapest and had gone with him to the Dohany Street Synagogue. He'd met the ghost of Numerus Clausus, had left his home and his family to come to Paris. Even here there were men like Lemarque, and student groups that demonstrated against Jews, and more than a few anti-Semitic newspapers. And now he had this new weight to bear, this new tsuris. For a moment, as he sat on his bench at the Jardin du Luxembourg, he wondered what it would be like to leave his Jewish self behind, to shrug off the garment of his religion like a coat that had become too heavy in hot weather. He remembered standing in the Sainte-Chapelle in September, the holiness and the stillness of the place, the few lines he knew from the Latin mass drifting through his mind: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison .
    Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy.

    For a moment it seemed simple, clear: become a Christian, and not just a Christian--a Roman Catholic, like the Christians who'd imagined Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, the Matyas Templom and the Basilica of Szent Istvan in Budapest. Shed his former life, take on a new history. Receive what had been withheld from him. Receive mercy.

    But when he thought of the word mercy , it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones , whose root was rechem , the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child. He'd prayed for it every year at synagogue in Konyar on the eve of Yom Kippur. He had asked to be forgiven, had fasted, had come away at the end of Yom Kippur with a sense of having been scraped clean. Every year he'd felt the need to hold his soul to account, to forgive and be forgiven. Every year his brothers had flanked him in synagogue--Matyas small and fierce on his left, Tibor lean and deep-voiced on his right. Beside them was their father in his familiar tallis, and behind