Free The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer Page A

the women's partition, their mother--patient, forbearing, firm, her presence certain even when they could not see her. He could no sooner cease being Jewish than he could cease being a brother to his brothers, a son to his father and mother.

    He stood, giving a last look to the beekeeper and his bees, and set off across the park toward home. He was thinking now not of what had happened but of what he was going to have to do next: find a job, a way of making the money it would take to stay in school. He wasn't French, of course, but that didn't matter; in Budapest, thousands of workers were paid under the table and no one was the wiser. Tomorrow was Saturday.
    Offices would be closed, but shops and restaurants would be open--bakeries, groceries, bookshops, art-supply stores, brasseries, men's clothiers. If Tibor could work full-time in a shoe store and study his anatomy books at night, then Andras could work and go to school. By the time he had reached the rue des Ecoles, he was already framing the necessary phrase in his head: I'm looking for a job. In Hungarian, A llast keresek . In French, Je cherche ...je cherche... a job. He knew the word: un boulot .

CHAPTER FIVE
    Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt

    THAT FALL the Sarah-Bernhardt was presenting The Mother , a new play by Bertolt Brecht, at nine o'clock every night but Monday. The theater was located at the direct center of the city, in the place du Chatelet. It offered five tiers of luxurious seating and the thrilling awareness that Miss Bernhardt's voice had filled this space , had caused that chandelier to shiver on its chain. Somewhere inside the theater was the cream-and-gilt-paneled dressing room with the gold bathtub in which the actress had reputedly bathed in champagne. On the first Saturday in November the cast had been called for an unscheduled rehearsal; Claudine Villareal-Bloch, the Mother of the title, had suffered an acute attack of vocal strain that everyone tacitly attributed to her new affair with a young Brazilian press attache. Into these vaguely embarrassing circumstances, Madame Villareal-Bloch's understudy had been called at the last moment to take over the part.

    Marcelle Gerard paced her dressing room in a fury, wondering how Claudine Villareal-Bloch could have dared to spring this trick upon her; it seemed an intentional humiliation.
    Madame Villareal-Bloch knew that Madame Gerard, chafed by her position as understudy, had failed to prepare. That very morning in rehearsal she'd forgotten her lines and had stammered in the most unprofessional manner. In his office down the hall, Zoltan Novak drank Scotch neat and wondered what would happen to him if the play could not go forward, if Marcelle Gerard froze onstage as she had at that morning's rehearsal. The minister of culture himself was scheduled to attend the following night's performance; that was how popular the new Brecht play had become, and how dire the current situation was. If public embarrassment resulted tomorrow night, the blame would fall to Novak, the Hungarian. Failure was not French.

    Desperately, desperately, Zoltan Novak wanted to smoke. But he couldn't smoke.
    The previous night, when he'd learned of Madame Villareal-Bloch's illness, his wife had hidden his cigarettes, knowing he might tend toward excess; she had made him swear not to buy more, and vowed that she would sniff his clothes for smoke. As he paced his office in a state of nicotine-deprived anxiety, the production assistant came in with a list of urgent messages. The properties manager was missing a set of workers' shovels from the third scene; should they do the scene without them, or buy new shovels? Madame Gerard's name had been misspelled in the program for tomorrow night (Guerard, a minor mistake), and did he want the whole lot reprinted? Finally, there was a boy downstairs looking for a job. He claimed to know Monsieur, or at least that was what he seemed to be saying--his French was imperfect. What was his name?