The Invisible Bridge

CHAPTER ONE. A Letter

LATER HE WOULD TELL her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn’t bought the tickets. But it was Tibor’s opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy’s box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar’s jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women’s hair glittering with jewels.

“If only Mátyás could see this,” Andras said.

“He’ll see it, Andráska. He’ll come to Budapest when he’s got his baccalaureate, and in a year he’ll be sick to death of this place.”

Andras had to smile. He and Tibor had both moved to Budapest as soon as they graduated from gimnázium in Debrecen. They had all grown up in Konyár, a tiny village in the eastern flatlands, and to them, too, the capital city had once seemed like the center of the world. Now Tibor had plans to go to medical college in Italy, and Andras, who had lived here for only a year, was leaving for school in Paris. Until the news from the École Spéciale d’Architecture, they had all thought Tibor would be the first to go. For the past three years he’d been working as a salesclerk in a shoe store on Váci utca, saving money for his tuition and poring over his medical textbooks at night as desperately as if he were trying to save his own life. When Andras had moved in with him a year earlier, Tibor’s departure had seemed imminent. He had already passed his exams and submitted his application to the medical school at Modena. He thought it might take six months to get his acceptance and student visa. Instead the medical college had placed him on a waiting list for foreign students, and he’d been told it might be another year or two before he could matriculate.

Tibor hadn’t said a word about his own situation since Andras had learned of his scholarship, nor had he shown a trace of envy. Instead he had bought these opera tickets and helped Andras make his plans. Now, as the lights dimmed and the orchestra began to tune, Andras was visited by a private shame: Though he knew he would have been happy for Tibor if their situations had been reversed, he suspected he would have done a poor job of hiding his jealousy.

From a door at the side of the orchestra pit, a tall spindling man with hair like white flames emerged and stepped into a spotlight. The audience shouted its approval as this man made his way to the podium. He had to take three bows and raise his hands in surrender before they went quiet; then he turned to the musicians and lifted his baton. After a moment of quivering stillness, a storm of music rolled out of the brass and strings and entered Andras’s chest, filling his ribcage until he could scarcely breathe. The velvet curtain rose to reveal the interior of an Italian cathedral, its minutiae rendered in perfect and intricate detail. Stained-glass windows radiated amber and azure light, and a half-completed fresco of Mary Magdalene showed ghostly against a plaster wall. A man in striped prison garb crept into the church to hide in one of the dark chapels. A painter came in to work on the fresco, followed by a sexton bent upon making the painter tidy up his brushes and dropcloths before the next service. Then came the opera diva Tosca, the model for Mary Magdalene, her carmine skirts swirling around her ankles. Song flew up and hovered in the painted dome of the Operaház: the clarinetlike tenor of the painter Cavaradossi, the round basso of the fugitive Angelotti, the warm apricotty soprano of the fictional diva Tosca, played by the real Hungarian diva Zsuzsa Toronyi. The sound was so solid, so tangible, it seemed to Andras he could reach over the edge of the balcony and grab handfuls of it. The building itself had become an instrument, he thought: The architecture expanded the sound and completed it, amplified and contained it.

“I won’t forget this,” he whispered to his brother.

“You’d better not,” Tibor whispered back. “I expect you to take me to the opera when I visit you in Paris.”

At the intermission they drank small cups of black coffee in the refreshment salon and argued over what they’d seen. Was the painter’s refusal to betray his friend an act of selfless loyalty or self-glorifying bravado? Was his endurance of the torture that followed meant to be read as a sublimation of his sexual love for Tosca? Would Tosca herself have stabbed Scarpia if her profession hadn’t schooled her so thoroughly in the ways of melodrama? There was a bittersweet pleasure in the exchange; as a boy, Andras had spent hours listening to Tibor debate points of philosophy or sport or literature with his friends, and had pined for the day when he might say something Tibor would find witty or incisive. Now that he and Tibor had become equals, or something like equals, Andras was leaving, getting on a train to be carried hundreds of kilometers away.

“What is it?” Tibor said, his hand on Andras’s sleeve.

“Too much smoke,” Andras said, and coughed, averting his eyes from Tibor’s. He was relieved when the lights flickered to signal the end of the intermission.

After the third act, when the innumerable curtain calls were over-the dead Tosca and Cavaradossi miraculously revived, the evil Scarpia smiling sweetly as he accepted an armload of red roses-Andras and Tibor pushed toward the exit and made their way down the crowded stairs. Outside, a faint scattering of stars showed above the wash of city light. Tibor took his arm and led him toward the Andrássy side of the building, where the dress-circle and orchestra-floor patrons were spilling through the three marble arches of the grand entrance.

“I want you to have a look at the main foyer,” Tibor said. “We’ll tell the usher we left something inside.”

Andras followed him through the central doorway and into the chandelier-lit hall, where a marble stairway spread its wings toward a gallery. Men and women in evening dress descended, but Andras saw only architecture: the egg-and-dart molding along the stairway, the cross-barrel vault above, the pink Corinthian columns that supported the gallery. Miklós Ybl, a Hungarian from Székesfehérvár, had won an international competition to design the opera house; Andras’s father had given him a book of Ybl’s architectural drawings for his eighth birthday, and he had spent many long afternoons studying this space. As the departing audience flowed around him, he stared up into the vault of the ceiling, so intent upon reconciling this three-dimensional version with the line drawings in his memory that he scarcely noticed when someone paused before him and spoke. He had to blink and force himself to focus upon the person, a large dovelike woman in a sable coat, who appeared to be begging his pardon. He bowed and stepped aside to let her pass.

“No, no,” she said. “You’re just where I want you. What luck to run into you here! I would never have known how to find you.”

He struggled to recall when and where he might have met this woman. A diamond necklace glinted at her throat, and the skirt of a rose silk gown spilled from beneath her pelisse; her dark hair was arranged in a cap of close-set curls. She took his arm and led him out onto the front steps of the opera house.

“It was you at the bank the other day, wasn’t it?” she said. “You were the one with the envelope of francs.”

Now he knew her: It was Elza Hász, the wife of the bank director. Andras had seen her a few times at the great synagogue on Dohány utca, where he and Tibor went for an occasional Friday night service. The other day at the bank he’d jostled her as she crossed the lobby; she’d dropped the striped hatbox she was carrying, and he’d lost his grip on his paper folder of francs. The folder had opened, discharging the pink-and-green bills, and the money had fluttered around their feet like confetti. He’d dusted off the hatbox and handed it back to her, then watched her disappear though a door marked PRIVATE.

“You look to be my son’s age,” she said now. “And judging from your currency, I would guess you’re off to school in Paris.”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“You must do me a great favor. My son is studying at the Beaux-Arts, and I’d like you to take a package for him. Would it be a terrible inconvenience?”

A moment passed before he could respond. To agree to take a package to someone in Paris would mean that he was truly going, that he intended to leave his brothers and his parents and his country behind and step into the vast unknown of Western Europe.

“Where does your son live?” he asked.

“The Quartier Latin, of course,” she said, and laughed. “In a painter’s garret, not in a lovely villa like our Cavaradossi. Though he tells me he has hot water and a view of the Panthéon. Ah, there’s the car!” A gray sedan pulled to the curb, and Mrs. Hász lifted her arm and signaled to the driver. “Come tomorrow before noon. Twenty-six Benczúr utca. I’ll have everything ready.” She pulled the collar of her coat closer and ran down to the car, not pausing to look back at Andras.

“Well!” Tibor said, coming out to join him on the steps. “Suppose you tell me what that was all about.”

“I’m to be an international courier. Madame Hász wants me to take a box to her son in Paris. We met at the bank the other day when I went to exchange pengő for francs.”

“And you agreed?”

“I did.”

Tibor sighed, glancing off toward the yellow streetcars passing along the boulevard. “It’s going to be awfully dull around here without you, Andráska.”

“Nonsense. I predict you’ll have a girlfriend within a week.”

“Oh, yes. Every girl goes mad for a penniless shoe clerk.”

Andras smiled. “At last, a little self-pity! I was beginning to resent you for being so generous and coolheaded.”

“Not at all. I could kill you for leaving. But what good would that do? Then neither of us would get to go abroad.” He grinned, but his eyes were grave behind his silver-rimmed spectacles. He linked arms with Andras and pulled him down the steps, humming a few bars from the overture. It was only three blocks to their building on Hársfa utca; when they reached the entry they paused for a last breath of night air before going up to the apartment. The sky above the Operaház was pale orange with reflected light, and the streetcar bells echoed from the boulevard. In the semidarkness Tibor seemed to Andras as handsome as a movie legend, his hat set at a daring angle, his white silk evening scarf thrown over one shoulder. He looked at that moment like a man ready to take up a thrilling and unconventional life, a man far better suited than Andras to step off a railway car in a foreign land and claim his place there. Then he winked and pulled the key from his pocket, and in another moment they were racing up the stairs like gimnázium boys.

Mrs. Hász lived near the Városliget, the city park with its storybook castle and its vast rococo outdoor baths. The house on Benczúr utca was an Italianate villa of creamy yellow stucco, surrounded on three sides by hidden gardens; the tops of espaliered trees rose from behind a white stone wall. Andras could make out the faint splash of a fountain, the scratch of a gardener’s rake. It struck him as an unlikely place for Jewish people to live, but at the entrance there was a mezuzah nailed to the doorframe-a silver cylinder wrapped in gold ivy. When he pressed the doorbell, a five-note chime sounded from inside. Then came the approaching click of heels on marble, and the throwing back of heavy bolts. A silver-haired housemaid opened the door and ushered him in. He stepped into a domed entrance hall with a floor of pink marble, an inlaid table, a sheaf of calla lilies in a Chinese vase.

“Madame Hász is in the sitting room,” the housemaid said.

He followed her across the entry hall and down a vaulted corridor, and they stopped just outside a doorway through which he could hear the crescendo and decrescendo of women’s voices. He couldn’t make out the words, but it was clear that there was an argument in progress: One voice climbed and peaked and dropped off; another, quieter than the first, rose and insisted and fell silent.

“Wait here a moment,” the housemaid said, and went in to announce Andras’s arrival. At the announcement the voices exchanged another brief volley, as if the argument had something to do with Andras himself. Then the housemaid reappeared and ushered Andras into a large bright room that smelled of buttered toast and flowers. On the floor were pink-and-gold Persian rugs; white damask chairs stood in conversation with a pair of salmon-colored sofas, and a low table held a bowl of yellow roses. Mrs. Hász had risen from her chair in the corner. At a writing desk near the window sat an older woman in widow’s black, her hair covered with a lace shawl. She held a wax-sealed letter, which she set atop a pile of books and pinned beneath a glass paperweight. Mrs. Hász crossed the room to meet Andras and pressed his hand in her large cold one.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “This is my mother-in-law, the elder Mrs. Hász.” She nodded toward the woman in black. The woman was of delicate build, with a deep-lined face that Andras found lovely despite its aura of grief; her large gray eyes radiated quiet pain. He gave a bow and pronounced the formal greeting: Kezét csókolom, I kiss your hand.

The elder Mrs. Hász nodded in return. “So you’ve agreed to take a box to József,” she said. “That was very kind of you. I’m sure you have a great deal to think about already.”

“It’s no trouble at all.”

“We won’t keep you long,” said the younger Mrs. Hász. “Simon is packing the last items now. I’ll ring for something to eat in the meantime. You look famished.”

“Oh, no, please don’t bother,” Andras said. In fact, the smell of toast had reminded him that he hadn’t eaten all day; but he worried that even the smallest meal in that house would require a lengthy ceremony, one whose rules were foreign to him. And he was in a hurry: His train left in three hours.

“Young men can always eat,” said the younger Mrs. Hász, calling the housemaid to her side. She gave a few instructions and sent the woman on her way.

The elder Mrs. Hász left her chair at the writing desk and beckoned Andras to sit beside her on one of the salmon-colored sofas. He sat down, worrying that his trousers would leave a mark on the silk; he would have needed a different grade of clothing altogether, it seemed to him, to pass an hour safely in that house. The elder Mrs. Hász folded her slim hands on her lap and asked Andras what he would study in Paris.

“Architecture,” Andras said.

“Indeed. So you’ll be a classmate of József’s at the Beaux-Arts, then?”

“I’ll be at the École Spéciale,” Andras said. “Not the Beaux-Arts.”

The younger Mrs. Hász settled herself on the opposite sofa. “The École Spéciale? I haven’t heard József mention it.”

“It’s rather more of a trade school than the Beaux-Arts,” Andras said. “That’s what I understand, anyway. I’ll be there on a scholarship from the Izraelita Hitközség. It was a happy accident, actually.”

“An accident?”

And Andras explained: The editor of Past and Future, the magazine where he worked, had submitted some of Andras’s cover designs for an exhibition in Paris -a show of work by young Central European artists. His covers had been selected and exhibited; a professor from the École Spéciale had seen the show and had made inquiries about Andras. The editor had told him that Andras wanted to become an architect, but that it was difficult for Jewish students to get into architecture school in Hungary: A defunct numerus clausus, which in the twenties had restricted the number of Jewish students to six percent, still haunted the admissions practices of Hungarian universities. The professor from the École Spéciale had written letters, had petitioned his admissions board to give Andras a place in the incoming class. The Budapest Jewish community association, the Izraelita Hitközség, had put up the money for tuition, room, and board. It had all happened in a matter of weeks, and at every moment it seemed as if it might fall through. But it hadn’t; he was going. His classes would begin six days from now.

“Ah,” said the younger Mrs. Hász. “How fortunate! And a scholarship, too!” But at the last words she lowered her eyes, and Andras experienced the return of a feeling from his school days in Debrecen: a sudden shame, as if he’d been stripped to his underclothes. A few times he’d spent weekend afternoons at the homes of boys who lived in town, whose fathers were barristers or bankers, who didn’t have to board with poor families-boys who slept alone in their beds at night and wore ironed shirts to school and ate lunch at home every day. Some of these boys’ mothers treated him with solicitous pity, others with polite distaste. In their presence he’d felt similarly naked. Now he forced himself to look at József’s mother as he said, “Yes, it’s very lucky.”

“And where will you live in Paris?”

He rubbed his damp palms against his knees. “The Latin Quarter, I suppose.”

“But where will you stay when you arrive?”

“I imagine I’ll just ask someone where students take rooms.”

“Nonsense,” said the elder Mrs. Hász, covering his hand with her own. “You’ll go to József’s, that’s what you’ll do.”

The younger Mrs. Hász gave a cough and smoothed her hair. “We shouldn’t make commitments for József,” she said. “He may not have room for a guest.”

“Oh, Elza, you’re a terrible snob,” said the elder Mrs. Hász. “Mr. Lévi is doing a service for József. Surely József can spare a sofa for him, at least for a few days. We’ll wire him this afternoon.”

“Here are the sandwiches,” said the younger, visibly relieved by the distraction.

The housemaid wheeled a tea cart into the room. In addition to the tea service there was a glass cake stand with a stack of sandwiches so pale they looked to be made of snow. A pair of scissorlike silver tongs lay beside the pedestal, as if to suggest that sandwiches like these were not meant to be touched by human hands. The elder Mrs. Hász took up the tongs and piled sandwiches onto Andras’s plate, more than he would have dared to take for himself. When the younger Mrs. Hász herself picked up a sandwich without the aid of silverware or tongs, Andras made bold to eat one of his own. It consisted of dilled cream cheese on soft white bread from which the crusts had been cut. Paper-thin slices of yellow pepper provided the only indication that the sandwich had originated from within the borders of Hungary.

While the younger Mrs. Hász poured Andras a cup of tea, the elder went to the writing desk and withdrew a white card upon which she asked Andras to write his name and travel information. She would wire József, who would be waiting at the station in Paris. She offered him a glass pen with a gold nib so fine he was afraid to use it. He leaned over the low table and wrote the information in his blocky print, terrified that he would break the nib or drip ink onto the Persian rug. Instead he inked his fingers, a fact he apprehended only when he looked down at his final sandwich and saw that the bread was stained purple. He wondered how long it would be until Simon, whoever that was, appeared with the box for József. A sound of hammering came from far off down the hallway; he hoped it was the box being closed.

It seemed to please the elder Mrs. Hász to see that Andras had finished his sandwiches. She gave him her grief-etched smile. “This will be your first time in Paris, then.”

“Yes,” Andras said. “My first time out of the country.”

“Don’t let my grandson offend you,” she said. “He’s a sweet child once you get to know him.”

“József is a perfect gentleman,” said the younger Mrs. Hász, flushing to the roots of her close-set curls.

“It’s kind of you to wire him,” Andras said.

“Not at all,” said the elder Mrs. Hász. She wrote József’s address on another card and gave it to Andras. A moment later, a man in butler’s livery entered the sitting room with an enormous wooden crate in his arms.

“Thank you, Simon,” said the younger Mrs. Hász. “You may leave it there.”

The man set the crate down on the rug and retreated. Andras glanced at the gold clock on the mantel. “Thank you for the sandwiches,” he said. “I’d better be off now.”

“Stay another moment, if you don’t mind,” said the elder Mrs. Hász. “I’d like to ask you to take one more thing.” She went to the writing desk and slid the sealed letter from beneath its paperweight.

“Excuse me, Mr. Lévi,” said the younger. She rose and crossed the room to meet her mother-in-law, and put a hand on her arm. “We’ve already discussed this.”

“I won’t repeat myself, then,” said the elder Mrs. Hász, lowering her voice. “Kindly remove your hand, Elza.”

The younger Mrs. Hász shook her head. “György would agree with me. It’s unwise.”

“My son is a good man, but he doesn’t always know what’s wise and what is not,” said the elder. She extricated her arm gently from the younger woman’s grasp, returned to the salmon-colored sofa, and handed the envelope to Andras. Written on its face was the name C. MORGENSTERN and an address in Paris.

“It’s a message for a family friend,” said the elder Mrs. Hász, her eyes steady on Andras’s. “Perhaps you’ll think me overcautious, but for certain matters I don’t trust the Hungarian post. Things can get lost, you know, or fall into the wrong hands.” She kept her gaze fixed upon him as she spoke, seeming to ask him not to question what she meant, nor what matters might be delicate enough to require this degree of caution. “If you please, I’d rather you not mention it to anyone. Particularly not to my grandson. Just buy a stamp and drop this into a mailbox once you get to Paris. You’ll be doing me a great favor.”

Andras put the letter into his breast pocket. “Easily done,” he said.

The younger Mrs. Hász stood rigid beside the writing desk, her cheeks bright beneath their patina of powder. One hand still rested on the stack of books, as though she might call the letter back across the room and have it there again. But there was nothing to be done, Andras saw; the elder Mrs. Hász had won, and the younger now had to proceed as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She composed her expression and smoothed her gray skirt, returning to the sofa where Andras sat.

“Well,” she said, and folded her hands. “It seems we’ve concluded our business. I hope my son will be a help to you in Paris.”

“I’m certain he will,” Andras said. “Is that the box you’d like me to take?”

“It is,” said the younger Mrs. Hász, and gestured him toward it.

The wooden crate was large enough to contain a pair of picnic hampers. When Andras lifted it, he felt a deep tug in his intestines. He took a few staggering steps toward the door.

“Dear me,” said the younger Mrs. Hász. “Can you manage?”

Andras ventured a mute nod.

“Oh, no. You mustn’t strain yourself.” She pressed a button in the wall and Simon reappeared a moment later. He took the box from Andras and strode out through the front door of the house. Andras followed, and the elder Mrs. Hász accompanied him to the driveway, where the long gray car was waiting. Apparently they meant to send him home in it. It was of English make, a Bentley. He wished Tibor were there to see it.

The elder Mrs. Hász put a hand on his sleeve. “Thank you for everything,” she said.

“It’s a pleasure,” Andras said, and bowed in farewell.

She pressed his arm and went inside; the door closed behind her without a sound. As the car pulled away, Andras found himself twisting backward to look at the house again. He searched the windows, unsure of what he expected to see. There was no movement, no curtain-flutter or glimpse of a face. He imagined the younger Mrs. Hász returning to the drawing room in wordless frustration, the elder retreating deeper behind that butter-colored façade, entering a room whose overstuffed furniture seemed to suffocate her, a room whose windows offered a comfortless view. He turned away and rested an arm on the box for József, and gave his Hársfa utca address for the last time.

CHAPTER TWO. The Western Europe Express

HE TOLD TIBOR about the letter, of course; he couldn’t have kept a secret like that from his brother. In their shared bedroom, Tibor took the envelope and held it up to the light. It was sealed with a clot of red wax into which the elder Mrs. Hász had pressed her monogram.

“What do you make of it?” Andras said.

“Operatic intrigues,” Tibor said, and smiled. “An old lady’s fancy, coupled with paranoia about the unreliability of the post. A former paramour, this Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. That’s what I’d bet.” He returned the letter to Andras. “Now you’re a player in their romance.”

Andras tucked the letter into a pocket of his suitcase and told himself not to forget it. Then he checked his list for the fiftieth time, and found that there was nothing left to do now but to leave for Paris. To save the taxi fare, he and Tibor borrowed a wheelbarrow from the grocer next door and wheeled Andras’s suitcase and József’s enormous box all the way to Nyugati Station. At the ticket window there was a disagreement over Andras’s passport, which apparently looked too new to be authentic; an emigration officer had to be consulted, and then a more exalted officer, and finally an über-officer in a coat peppered with gold buttons, who made a tiny mark on the edge of the passport and reprimanded the other officers for calling him away from his duties. Minutes after the matter had been settled, Andras, fumbling with his leather satchel, dropped his passport into the narrow gap between the platform and the train. A sympathetic gentleman offered his umbrella; Tibor inserted the umbrella between platform and train and slid the passport to a place where he could retrieve it.

“I’d say it looks authentic now,” Tibor said, handing it over. The passport was smudged with dirt and torn at one corner where Tibor had stabbed it with the umbrella. Andras replaced it in his pocket and they walked down the platform to the door of his third-class carriage, where a conductor in a red-and-gold cap ushered passengers aboard.

“Well,” Tibor said. “I suppose you’d better find your seat.” His eyes were damp behind his glasses, and he put a hand on Andras’s arm. “Hold on to that passport from now on.”

“I will,” Andras said, not making a move to board the train. The great city of Paris awaited; suddenly he felt lightheaded with dread.

“All aboard,” the conductor said, and gave Andras a significant look.

Tibor kissed Andras on both cheeks and drew him close for a long moment. When they were boys going off to school, their father had always put his hands on their heads and said the prayer for travel before he let them on the train; now Tibor whispered the words under his breath. May God direct your steps toward tranquility and keep you from the hands of every foe. May you be safe from all misfortune on this earth. May God grant you mercy in his eyes and in the eyes of all who see you. He kissed Andras again. “You’ll come back a worldly man,” he said. “An architect. You’ll build me a house. I’m counting on it, do you hear?”

Andras couldn’t speak. He let out a long breath and looked down at the smooth concrete of the platform, where travel stickers had adhered in multinational profusion. Germany. Italy. France. The tie to his brother felt visceral, vascular, as though they were linked at the chest; the idea of boarding a train to be taken away from him seemed as wrong as ceasing to breathe. The train whistle blew.

Tibor removed his glasses and pressed the corners of his eyes. “Enough of this,” he said. “I’ll see you before long. Now go.”

Sometime after dark, Andras found himself looking out the window at a little town where the street signs and shop signs were all in German. The train must have slipped over the border without his knowing it; while he had been asleep with a book of Petőfi poems on his lap, they had left the landlocked ovulet of Hungary and entered the larger world. He cupped his hands against the glass and looked for Austrians in the narrow lanes, but could see none; gradually the houses became smaller and farther apart, and the town dwindled into countryside. Austrian barns, shadowy in moonlight. Austrian cows. An Austrian wagon, piled with silver hay. In the far distance, against a night-blue sky, the deeper blue of mountains. He opened the window a few inches; the air outside was crisp and smelled of woodsmoke.

He had the strange sensation of not knowing who he was, of having traveled off the map of his own existence. It was the opposite of the feeling he had every time he traveled east between Budapest and Konyár to see his parents; on those trips to his own birthplace there was a sense of moving deeper into himself, toward some essential core, as if toward the rice-sized miniature at the center of the Russian nesting doll his mother kept on the windowsill in her kitchen. But who might he imagine himself to be now, this Andras Lévi on a train passing westward through Austria? Before he’d left Budapest, he had scarcely considered how ill-equipped he was for an adventure like this one, a five-year course of study at an architectural college in Paris. Vienna or Prague he might have managed; he had always gotten high marks in German, which he’d studied since the age of twelve. But it was Paris and the École Spéciale that wanted him, and now he would have to get by on his two years of half-forgotten French. He knew little more than a smattering of food names, body parts, and laudatory adjectives. Like the other boys at his school in Debrecen, he had memorized the French words for the sexual positions that appeared on a set of old photographs passed along from one generation of students to another: croupade, les ciseaux, à la grecque. The cards were so old, and had been handled so thoroughly, that the images of intertwined couples were visible only as silver ghosts, and only when the cards were held at a particular angle to the light. Beyond that, what did he know of French-or, for that matter, of France? He knew that the country bordered the Mediterranean on one side and the Atlantic on another. He knew a little about the troop movements and battles of the Great War. He knew, of course, about the great cathedrals at Reims and at Chartres; he knew about Notre-Dame, about Sacré-Coeur, about the Louvre. And that was all, give or take a fragmentary fact. In the few weeks he’d had to prepare for the trip, he’d tortured the pages of his antiquated phrase book, bought cheap at a used bookstore on Szent István körút. The book must have predated the Great War; it offered translations for phrases like Where might I hire a team of horses? and I am Hungarian but my friend is Prussian.

Last weekend when he’d gone home to Konyár say goodbye to his parents, he’d found himself confessing his fears to his father as they walked through the orchard after dinner. He hadn’t meant to say anything; between the boys and their father was the tacit understanding that as Hungarian men, they were not to show any sign of weakness, even at times of crisis. But as they passed between the apple rows, kicking through the knee-high stems of wild grass, Andras felt compelled to speak. Why, he wondered aloud, had he been singled out for recognition among all the artists in the show in Paris? How had the École Spéciale admissions board determined that he, in particular, deserved their favor? Even if his pieces had shown some special merit, who was to say he could ever produce work like that again, or, more to the point, that he’d succeed at the study of architecture, a discipline vastly different from any he’d undertaken before? At best, he told his father, he was the beneficiary of misplaced faith; at worst, a simple fraud.

His father threw his head back and laughed. “A fraud?” he said. “You, who used to read aloud to me from Miklós Ybl when you were eight years old?”

“It’s one thing to love an art and another to be good at it.”

“There was a time when men studied architecture just because it was a noble pursuit,” his father said.

“There are nobler pursuits. The medical arts, for example.”

“That’s your brother’s talent. You’ve got your own. And now you’ve got time and money to court it.”

“And what if I fail?”

“Ah! Then you’ll have a story to tell.”

Andras picked up a fallen branch from the ground and switched at the long grass. “It seems selfish,” he said. “Going off to school in Paris, and at someone else’s expense.”

“You’d be going at my expense if I could afford it, believe me. I won’t have you think of it as selfish.”

“What if you get pneumonia again this year? The lumberyard can’t run itself.”

“Why not? I’ve got the foreman and five good sawyers. And Mátyás isn’t far away if I need more help.”

“Mátyás, that little crow?” Andras shook his head. “Even if you could catch him, you’d be lucky to get any work out of him.”

“Oh, I could get work out of him,” his father said. “Though I hope I won’t have to. That scapegrace will have trouble enough graduating, with all the foolery he’s gotten into this past year. Did you know he’s joined some sort of dance troupe? He’s performing nights at a club and missing his morning classes.”

“I’ve heard all about it. All the more reason I shouldn’t be going off to school so far away. Once he moves to Budapest, someone’s got to look after him.”

“It’s not your fault you can’t go to school in Budapest,” his father said. “You’re at the mercy of your circumstances. I know something of that. But you do what you can with what you’ve got.”

Andras understood what he meant. His father had gone to the Jewish theological seminary in Prague, and might have become a rabbi if it hadn’t been for his own father’s early death; a series of tragedies had attended him through his twenties, enough to have made a weaker man surrender to despair. Since then he’d experienced a reversal of fortune so profound that everyone in the village believed he must have been particularly pitied and favored by the Almighty. But Andras knew that everything good that had come to him was the result of his own sheer stubbornness and hard work.

“It’s a blessing you’re going to Paris,” his father said. “Better to get out of this country where Jewish men have to feel second-class. I can promise you that’s not going to improve while you’re gone, though let’s hope it won’t get worse.”

Now, as Andras rode westward in the darkened railway carriage, he heard those words in his mind again; he understood that there had been another fear beneath the ones he’d spoken aloud. He found himself thinking of a newspaper story he’d read recently about a horrible thing that had happened a few weeks earlier in the Polish town of Sandomierz: In the middle of the night the windows of shops in the Jewish Quarter had been broken, and small paper-wrapped projectiles had been thrown inside. When the shop owners unwrapped the projectiles, they saw that they were the sawn-off hooves of goats. Jews’ Feet, the paper wrappings read.

Nothing like that had ever happened in Konyár; Jews and non-Jews had lived there in relative peace for centuries. But the seeds were there, Andras knew. At his primary school in Konyár, his schoolmates had called him Zsidócska, little Jew; when they’d all gone swimming, his circumcision had been a mark of shame. One time they held him down and tried to force a sliver of pork sausage between his clenched teeth. Those boys’ older brothers had tormented Tibor, and a younger set had been waiting for Mátyás when he got to school. How would those Konyár boys, now grown into men, read the news from Poland? What seemed an atrocity to him might seem to them like justice, or permission. He put his head against the cool glass of the window and stared into the unfamiliar landscape, surprised only by how much it looked like the flatland country where he had been born.

In Vienna the train stopped at a station far grander than any Andras had ever seen. The façade, ten stories high, was composed of glass panes supported by a gridwork of gilded iron; the supports were curlicued and flowered and cherubed in a design that seemed better suited to a boudoir than a train station. Andras got off the train and followed the scent of bread to a cart where a woman in a white cap was selling salt-studded pretzels. But the woman wouldn’t take his pengő or his francs. In her insistent German she tried to explain what Andras must do, pointing him toward the money-changing booth. The line at the booth snaked around a corner. Andras looked at the station clock and then at the stack of pretzels. It had been eight hours since he’d eaten the delicate sandwiches at the house on Benczúr utca.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to find the gentleman from Keleti Station, the one who had let Tibor use his umbrella to retrieve Andras’s passport. The man was dressed in a gray traveling suit and a light overcoat; the dull gold of a watch chain shone against his vest. He was barrel-chested and tall, his dark hair brushed back in waves from a high domed forehead. He carried a glossy briefcase and a copy of La Revue du Cinema.

“Let me buy you a pretzel,” he said. “I’ve got some schillings.”

“You’ve been too kind already,” Andras said.

But the man stepped forward and bought two pretzels, and they went to a nearby bench to eat. The gentleman pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from a pocket and spread it over his trouser legs.

“I like a fresh-made pretzel better than anything they serve in the dining car,” the man said. “Besides, the first-class passengers tend to be first-class bores.”

Andras nodded, eating in silence. The pretzel was still hot, the salt electric on his tongue.

“I gather you’re going on past Vienna,” the man said.

“ Paris,” Andras ventured. “I’m going there to study.”

The man turned his deep-lined eyes on Andras and scrutinized him for a long moment. “A future scientist? A man of law?”

“Architecture,” Andras said.

“Very good. A practical art.”

“And yourself?” Andras asked. “What’s your destination?”

“The same as yours,” the man said. “I run a theater in Paris, the Sarah-Bernhardt. Though it might be more correct to say the Sarah-Bernhardt runs me. Like a demanding mistress, I’m afraid. Theater: Now, there’s an impractical art.”

“Must art be practical?”

The man laughed. “No, indeed.” And then: “Do you go to the theater?”

“Not often enough.”

“You’ll have to come to the Sarah-Bernhardt, then. Present my card at the box office and tell them I sent you. Say you’re a compatriote of mine.” He extracted a card from a gold case and handed it to Andras. NOVAK Zoltán, metteur en scène, Théâtre 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 Théâtre 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. Zoltán Novak.”

“Andras Lévi.” 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 café 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 unerwünscht. 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 man in an expensive overcoat who seemed to be looking for someone. He hadn’t asked for a description or a photograph of József. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might have trouble finding each other. But an increasing number of passengers filled the platform, and Parisians ran to greet them, and József failed to appear. Amid the crush Andras caught a glimpse of Zoltán Novak; a woman in a smart hat and a fur-collared coat threw her arms around him. Novak kissed the woman and led her away from the train, and porters followed with his luggage.

Andras retrieved his own suitcase and the enormous box for József. He stood and waited as the crowd became even more dense and then began to dissipate. Still no brisk-looking young man stepped forward to conduct him into a life in Paris. He sat down on the wooden crate, suddenly lightheaded. He needed a place to sleep. He needed to eat. In a few days’ time he was supposed to appear at the École Spéciale, ready to begin his studies. He looked toward the row of doors marked SORTIE, at the lights of cars passing on the street outside. A quarter of an hour rolled by, and then another, without any sign of József Hász.

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the heavy card on which the elder Mrs. Hász had written her grandson’s address. This was all the direction he had. For six francs Andras recruited a walrus-faced porter to help him load his luggage and József’s enormous box into a taxi. He gave the driver József’s address and they rushed off in the direction of the Quartier Latin. As they sped along, the taxi driver kept up a steady stream of jocose French, of which Andras understood not a word.

He was hardly aware of what they passed on the way to József Hász’s. Fog tumbled in billows through the light of the streetlamps, and wet leaves blew against the windows of the cab. The gold-lit buildings spun by in a rush; the streets were full of Saturday night revelers, men and women with their arms slung loosely around each other. The cab sped over a river that must have been the Seine, and for an instant Andras allowed himself to imagine that they were passing over the Danube, that he was back in Budapest, and that in a short time he’d find himself home at the apartment on Hársfa utca, where he could climb the stairs and crawl into bed with Tibor. But then the taxi stopped in front of a gray stone building and the driver climbed out to unload Andras’s luggage. Andras fumbled in his pocket for more money. The driver tipped his hat, took the francs Andras offered, and said something that sounded like the Hungarian word bocsánat, I’m sorry, but which Andras later understood to be bon chance. Then the cab pulled away, leaving Andras alone on a sidewalk of the Quartier Latin.

CHAPTER THREE. The Quartier Latin

JÓZSEF HÁSZ’S BUILDING was of sharp-edged sandstone, six stories with tall casements and ornate cast-iron balconies. From the top floor came a blast of hot jazz, cornet and piano and saxophone dueling just beyond the blazing windows. Andras went to the door to ring the bell, but the door had been propped open; in the vestibule a cluster of girls in close-fitting silk dresses stood drinking champagne and smoking violet-scented cigarettes. They gave him hardly a glance as he dragged his luggage inside and pushed it against the wall. With his heart in his throat he stepped forward to touch one of the girls on the sleeve, and she turned a coy eye toward him and raised a painted brow.

“József Hász?” he said.

The girl raised one finger and pointed toward the very top of the oval staircase. “Là-bas,” she said. “En haut.”

He dragged his luggage and the massive box into the lift, and took it as high as it would go. At the top, he stepped out into a crush of men and women, of smoke and jazz; the entirety of the Latin Quarter, it seemed, had assembled at József Hász’s. Leaving his luggage in the hall, he stepped in through the open door of the apartment and repeated the question of Hász’s name to a series of drunken revelers. After a labyrinthine tour of high-ceilinged rooms he found himself standing on a balcony with Hász himself, a tall, loose-limbed young man in a velvet smoking jacket. Hász’s large gray eyes rested on Andras’s in an expression of champagne-tinged bemusement, and he asked a question in French and raised his glass.

Andras shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s got to be Hungarian for now,” he said.

József squinted at him. “And which Hungarian are you, exactly?”

“Andras Lévi. The Hungarian from your mother’s telegram.”

“What telegram?”

“Didn’t your mother send a telegram?”

“Oh, God, that’s right! Ingrid said there was a telegram.” József put a hand on Andras’s shoulder, then leaned in through the door of the balcony and shouted, “Ingrid!”

A blond girl in a spangled leotard pushed out onto the balcony and stood with one hand on her hip. A rapid French exchange ensued, after which Ingrid produced from her bosom a folded telegram envelope. József extracted the slip, read it, looked at Andras, read it again, and fell into a paroxysm of laughter.

“You poor man!” József said. “I was supposed to meet you at the station two hours ago!”

“Yes, that was the idea.”

“You must have wanted to kill me!”

“I might still,” Andras said. His head was throbbing in time with the music, his eyes watering, his insides twisting with hunger. It was clear to him he couldn’t stay at József Hász’s, but he could hardly imagine venturing out now to find another place to spend the night.

“Well, you’ve done well enough without me so far,” József said. “Here you are at my place, where there’s enough champagne to last us all night, and plenty of whatever else you like, if you take my meaning.”

“All I need is a quiet corner to sleep in. Give me a blanket and put me anywhere.”

“I’m afraid there’s no quiet corner here,” József said. “You’ll have to have a drink instead. Ingrid will get you one. Follow me.” He pulled Andras into the apartment and placed him under the care of Ingrid, who produced what must have been the last clean champagne flute in the building and poured Andras a tall sparkling glassful. The bottle sufficed for Ingrid herself; she toasted Andras, gave him a long smoky kiss, and pulled him into the front room, where the pianist was faking his way through “Downtown Uproar” and the partygoers had just started to dance.

In the morning he woke on a sofa beneath a window, his eyes draped in a silk chemise, his head a mass of cotton wool, his shirt unbuttoned, his jacket rolled beneath his head, his left arm stinging with pins and needles. Someone had put an eiderdown over him and opened the curtains; a block of sunlight fell across his chest. He stared up at the ceiling, where the floral froth of a plaster medallion curled around the fluted brass base of a light fixture. A knot of gold branches grew downward from the base, bearing small flame-shaped bulbs. Paris, he thought, and pushed himself up on his elbows. The room was littered with party detritus and smelled of spilled champagne and wilted roses. He had a vague recollection of a prolonged tête-à-tête with Ingrid, and then of a drinking contest with József and a broad-shouldered American; after that he could remember nothing at all. His luggage and the crate for József had been dragged inside and stacked beside the fireplace. Hász himself was nowhere to be seen. Andras rolled from the sofa and wandered down the hall to a white-tiled bathroom, where he shaved at the basin and bathed in a lion-footed tub that dispensed hot water directly from the tap. Afterward he dressed in his only clean shirt and trousers and jacket. As he was searching for his shoes in the main room, he heard a key in the lock. It was Hász, carrying a pastry-shop box and a newspaper. He tossed the box on a low table and said, “Up so soon?”

“What’s that?” Andras said, eyeing the ribbon-tied box.

“The cure for your hangover.”

Andras opened the box to find half a dozen warm pastries nestled in waxed paper. Until that moment he hadn’t allowed himself to realize how desperately hungry he was. He ate one chocolate croissant and was halfway through another before he thought to offer the box to his host, who refused, laughing.

“I’ve been up for hours,” József said. “I’ve already had my breakfast and read the news. Spain ’s a wreck. France still won’t send troops. But there are two new beauty queens competing for the title of Miss Europe: the dark and lovely Mademoiselle de Los Reyes of Spain, and the mysterious Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia.” He tossed the newspaper to Andras. Two sleek ice-cold beauties in white evening gowns gazed from their photographs on the front page.

“I like de Los Reyes,” Andras said. “Those lips.”

“She looks like a Nationalist,” József said. “I like the other.” He loosened his orange silk scarf and sat back on the sofa, spreading his arms across its curving back. “Look at this place,” he said. “The maid doesn’t come until tomorrow morning. I’ll have to dine out today.”

“You ought to open that box. I’m sure your mother sent you something nice for dinner.”

“That box! I forgot all about it.” He brought it from across the room and pried open the top with a butter knife. Inside were a tin of almond cookies; a tin of rugelach; a tin into which an entire Linzer torte had been packed without a millimeter to spare; a supply of woolen underclothes for the coming winter; a box of stationery with the envelopes already addressed to his parents; a list of cousins upon whom he was supposed to call; a list of things he was supposed to procure for his mother, including certain intimate ladies’ garments; a new opera glass; and a pair of shoes made for him by his shoemaker on Váci utca, whose talents, he said, were unparalleled by those of any cobbler in Paris.

“My brother works at a shoe store on Váci utca,” Andras said, and mentioned the name of the shop.

“Not the same one, I’m afraid,” József said, a hint of condescension in his tone. He cut a slice of the Linzer torte, ate it, and pronounced it perfect. “You’re a good man, Lévi, dragging this cake across Europe. How can I repay the favor?”

“You might tell me how to set up a life here,” Andras said.

“Are you sure you want to take instruction from me?” József said. “I’m a wastrel and a libertine.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got no choice,” Andras said. “You’re the only person I know in Paris.”

“Ah! Lucky you, then,” József said. As they ate slices of Linzer torte from the tin, he recommended a Jewish boardinghouse and an art-supply store and a student dining club where Andras might get cheap meals. He didn’t dine there himself, of course-generally he had his meals sent up from a restaurant on the boulevard Saint-Germain-but he had friends who did, and found it tolerable. As for the fact that Andras was enrolled at the École Spéciale and not the Beaux-Arts, it was regrettable that they wouldn’t be schoolmates but probably just as well for Andras; József was a notoriously bad influence. And now that they had solved the problem of setting up Andras’s life in Paris, didn’t he want to come out to the balcony to have a smoke and look at his new city?

Andras allowed József to lead him through the bedroom and through the high French doors. The day was cold, and the previous night’s fog had settled into a fine drizzle; the sun was a silver coin behind a scrim of cloud.

“Here you are,” József said. “The most beautiful city on earth. That dome is the Panthéon, and over there is the Sorbonne. To the left is St.-Etienne-du-Mont, and if you lean this way you can see a sliver of Notre-Dame.”

Andras rested his hands on the railing and looked out over an expanse of unfamiliar gray buildings beneath a cold curtain of mist. Chimneys crowded the rooftops like strange alien birds, and the green haze of a park hovered beyond a battalion of zinc mansards. Far off to the west, blurred by distance, the Tour Eiffel melted upward into the sky. Between himself and that landmark lay thousands of unknown streets and shops and human beings, filling a distance so vast as to make the tower look wiry and fragile against the slate-gray clouds.

“Well?” József said.

“There’s a lot of it, isn’t there?”

“Enough to keep a man busy. In fact, I’ve got to be off again in a few minutes. I’ve got a lunch appointment with a certain Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia.” He winked and straightened his tie.

“Ah. You mean the girl in sequins from last night?”

“I’m afraid not,” József said, a slow smile coming to his face. “That’s another mademoiselle altogether.”

“Maybe you can spare one for me.”

“Not a chance, old boy,” József said. “I’m afraid I need them all to myself.” And he slipped through the balcony door and returned to the large front room, where he wrapped the orange silk scarf around his neck again and put on a loose jacket of smoke-colored wool. He caught up Andras’s satchel and Andras took the suitcase, and they brought everything down in the lift.

“I wish I could see you to that boardinghouse, but I’m late to meet my friend,” József said once they’d gotten everything out to the curb. “Here’s the cab fare, though. No, I insist! And come around for a drink sometime, won’t you? Let me know how you’re getting on.” He clapped Andras on the shoulder, shook his hand, and went off in the direction of the Panthéon, whistling.

Madame V, the proprietress of the boardinghouse, had a few useless words of Hungarian and plenty of unintelligible Yiddish, but no permanent place for Andras; she managed to communicate that he could spend the night on the couch in the upstairs hallway if he liked, but that he’d better go out at once to look for other lodgings. Still in a haze from the night at József’s, he ventured out into the Quartier Latin amid the artfully disheveled students with their canvas schoolbags, their portfolios, their bicycles, their stacks of political pamphlets and string-tied bakery boxes and market baskets and bouquets of flowers. Among them he felt overdressed and provincial, though his clothes were the same ones in which he had felt elegant and urban a week earlier in Budapest. On a cold bench in a dismal little plaza he combed his phrase book for the words for price, for student, for room, for how much. But it was one thing to understand that chambre à louer meant room for rent, and quite another to ring a doorbell and inquire in French about the chambre. He wandered from Saint-Michel to Saint-Germain, from the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine to the rue Clovis, re-cursing his inattentiveness in French class and making tiny notes in a tiny notebook about the locations of various chambres à louer. Before he could muster the courage to ring a single bell, he found himself utterly exhausted; sometime after dark he retreated to the boardinghouse in defeat.

That night, as he tried to find a comfortable position on the green sofa in the hallway, young men from all across Europe argued and fought and smoked and laughed and drank until long past midnight. None of the men spoke Hungarian, and none seemed to notice that there was a new man in their midst. Under different circumstances Andras might have gotten up to join them, but now he was so tired he could scarcely turn over beneath the blanket. The sofa, a spindly, ill-padded thing with wooden arms, seemed to have been designed as an instrument of torture. Once the men had gone to bed at last, rats emerged from the wainscoting to conduct their predawn scavengery; they ran the length of the hallway and stole the bread Andras had saved from dinner. The smells of decaying shoes and unwashed men and cooking grease followed him into his dreams. When he woke, sore and exhausted, he decided that one night had been enough. He would go out into the quartier that morning and inquire at the first place that advertised a room for rent.

On the rue des Écoles, near a tiny paved square with a spreading chestnut tree, he found a building with that now-familiar sign in the window: chambre à louer. He knocked on the red-painted door and crossed his arms, trying to ignore the rush of anxiety in his chest. The door swung open to reveal a short, square, heavy-browed woman, her mouth bent sideways into a scowl; on the bridge of her nose rested a pair of thick black-rimmed spectacles that made her eyes look tiny and faraway, as though they belonged to another, smaller person. Her wiry gray hair was flattened on one side, as if she had just been sleeping in a wing chair with her head on the wing. She put a fist on her hip and stared at Andras. Summoning all his courage, Andras forcefully mispronounced his need and pointed to the sign in the window.

The concierge understood. She beckoned him into a narrow tiled hall and led him up a spiral staircase with a skylight at the top. When they could go no higher, she took him down the hall to a long narrow garret with an iron bed against one wall, a crockery basin on a wooden stand, a farm table, a green wooden chair. Two dormer windows looked out onto the rue des Écoles; one of them was open, and on the windowsill sat an abandoned nest and the remnants of three blue eggs. In the fireplace there was a rusted grate, a broken toasting fork, an ancient crust of bread. The concierge shrugged and named a price. Andras searched his mind for the names of numbers, then cut the price in half. The concierge spat on the floor, stomped her feet, railed at Andras in French, and finally accepted his offer.

So it began: his life in Paris. He had an address, a brass key, a view. His view, like József’s, included the Panthéon and the pale limestone clock tower of St.-Étienne-du-Mont. Across the street was the Collège de France, and soon enough he would learn to use it as a marker for his building: 34 rue des Écoles, en face du Collège de France. Down the block was the Sorbonne. And farther away, down the boulevard Raspail, was the École Spéciale d’Architecture, where classes would begin on Monday. Once he had cleaned the room from top to bottom and unpacked his clothes into an apple crate, he counted his money and made a shopping list. He went down to the shops and bought a glass jar full of red currant jam, a box of cheap tea, a box of sugar, a mesh strainer, a bag of walnuts, a small brown crock of butter, a long baguette, and, as a single extravagance, a tiny nugget of cheese.

What a pleasure it was to fit his key to the lock, to open the door to his private room. He unloaded his groceries onto the windowsill and laid out his drawing supplies on the table. Then he sat down, sharpened a pencil with his knife, and sketched his view of the Panthéon onto a blank postal card. On its reverse he wrote his first message from Paris: Dear Tibor, I am here! I have a desperate garret; it’s everything I hoped for. On Monday I start school. Hurrah! Liberté, egalité, fraternité! With love, Andras. All he lacked was a stamp. He thought he might borrow one from the concierge; he knew there was a postbox around the corner. As he tried to picture exactly where it was, what came to mind instead was the recollection of an envelope, a wax seal, a monogram. He had forgotten the promise he’d made to the elder Mrs. Hász. Her missive to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné still waited in his suitcase. He dragged the case out from beneath the bed, half fearing that the letter would be gone, but it was there in the pocket where he’d put it, the wax seal intact. He ran downstairs to the concierge’s apartment and, with the help of his phrase book and a series of urgent gestures, begged a pair of stamps. After a search, he located the boîte aux lettres and slipped Tibor’s card inside. Then, imagining the pleasure of some silver-haired gentleman when the next day’s mail arrived, he dropped Mrs. Hász’s letter into the anonymous dark of the box.

CHAPTER FOUR. École Spéciale

TO GET TO SCHOOL he had to cross the Jardin du Luxembourg, past the elaborate Palais, past the fountain and the flowerbeds teeming with late snapdragons and marigolds. Children sailed elegant miniature boats in the fountain, and Andras thought with a kind of indignant pride of the scrapwood boats he and his brothers had sailed on the millpond in Konyár. There were green benches and close-clipped limes, a carousel with painted horses. On the far side of the park was a cluster of what looked to Andras like neat brown dollhouses; when he got closer he could hear the hum of bees. A veiled beekeeper bent toward one of the hives, waving his canister of smoke.

Andras walked down the rue de Vaugirard, with its art-supply shops and narrow cafés and secondhand bookstores, then down the wide boulevard Raspail with its stately apartment buildings. Already he felt a little more Parisian than he had when he’d first arrived. He had his apartment key on a cord around his neck, a copy of L’Oeuvre under his arm. He had knotted his scarf the way József Hász had knotted his, and he wore the strap of his leather bag slung diagonally across his chest, in the manner of the students of the Latin Quarter. His life in Budapest -the job at Past and Future, the apartment on Hársfa utca, the familiar sound of the streetcar bell-seemed to belong to another universe. With an unexpected pang of homesickness, he imagined Tibor sitting at their usual sidewalk table at their favorite café, within sight of the statue of Jókai Mór, the famous novelist who had escaped the Austrians during the 1848 revolution by disguising himself in his wife’s clothing. Farther east, in Debrecen, Mátyás would be drawing in his notebook as his classmates studied Latin declensions. And what about Andras’s parents? He must write to them tonight. He touched the silver watch in his pocket. His father had had it restored just before Andras had left; it was a fine old thing, its numbers painted in a spidery copperplate script, its hands a deep blue iridescent metal. The workings still functioned as well as they had in Andras’s grandfather’s time. Andras remembered sitting on his father’s knee and winding the watch, taking care not to tighten the spring too far; his father had done the same thing when he was a boy. And here was that same watch in Paris in 1937, a time when a person might be transported a distance of twelve hundred kilometers in a flash of days, or a telegram sent across a wire network in a matter of minutes, or a radio signal transmitted instantaneously through thin air. What a time to study architecture! The buildings he designed would be the ships in which human beings would sail toward the horizon of the twentieth century, then off the map and into the new millennium.

He found he had walked past the gates of the École Spéciale and now had to retrace his steps. Young men streamed in through a pair of tall blue doors at the center of a gray neoclassical building, the name of the school cut into the stone of its cornice. The École Spéciale d’Architecture! They had wanted him, had seen his work and chosen him, and he had come. He ran up the front steps and in through those blue doors. On the wall of the entryway was a plaque with gold bas-relief busts of two men: Emile Trélat, who had founded the school, and Gaston Trélat, who had succeeded his father as director. Emile and Gaston Trélat. Names he would always remember. He swallowed twice, smoothed his hair, and entered the registrar’s office.

The young woman behind the desk seemed a figure from a dream. Her skin was the color of dark-stained walnut, her close-cropped hair as glossy as satin. Her gaze was friendly, her dark-fringed eyes steady on his own. It didn’t occur to him to try to speak. Never before had he seen a woman so beautiful, nor had he ever encountered in real life a person of African descent. Now this gorgeous young black Frenchwoman asked him a question he couldn’t understand, and he mumbled one of his few French words-désolé-and wrote his name on a slip of paper, which he pushed across the desk. The young woman thumbed through a stack of thick envelopes in a wooden box and extracted one with his name, LÉVI, printed across the top in precise block capitals.

He thanked her in his awkward French. She told him he was welcome. He might have continued to stand there and stare if a group of students hadn’t come in at that moment, calling greetings to her and leaning over the desk to kiss her cheeks. Eh, Lucia! Ça va, bellissima? Andras slipped past the others, holding his envelope against his chest, and went out into the hall. Everyone had gathered under the glass roof of a central atrium where studio assignments had just been posted. He sat down on a low bench there and opened his envelope to find a list of classes:

COURS -PROFESSEUR

HISTOIRE D ’A RCHITECTURE -A. P ERRET

LES S TATIQUES -v. L E B OURGEOIS

ATELIER -P. V AGO

DESSINAGE -M. L ABELLE

All matter-of-fact, as though it were perfectly natural for Andras to study those subjects under the tutelage of famous architects. There was a long list of required texts and materials, and a small white card handwritten in Hungarian (by whom?) indicating that Andras, due to his scholarship status, would be permitted to purchase his books and supplies on the school’s credit at a bookstore on the boulevard Saint-Michel.

He read and reread the message, then looked around the atrium, wondering who could have been responsible for that piece of communication. The crowd of students provided no clue. None of them looked even vaguely Hungarian; they were all hopelessly, perfectly Parisian. But in one corner a trio of uncertain-looking young men stood close together and scanned the room. He could tell at a glance that they were first-year students, and the names on their folders suggested they were Jewish: ROSEN, POLANER, BEN YAKOV. He raised a hand in greeting, and they nodded, a kind of tacit recognition passing between them. The tallest of them waved him over.

Rosen was lanky, freckled, with unruly red hair and the vague beginnings of a goatee. He took Andras by the shoulder and introduced Ben Yakov, who resembled the handsome French film star Pierre Fresnay; and Polaner, small and light-boned, with a neat, close-shorn head and tapering hands. Andras greeted everyone and repeated his own name, and the young men’s conversation continued in quick French as Andras tried to pick up a thread of meaning. Rosen seemed to be the leader of the group; he led the conversation, and the others listened and responded. Polaner seemed nervous, buttoning and unbuttoning the top button of his antique-looking velvet jacket. The handsome Ben Yakov eyed a group of young women; one of them waved, and he waved in return. Then he leaned in toward Polaner and Rosen to make what could only have been a suggestive joke, and the three of them laughed. Though Andras found himself struggling to follow the men’s talk, and though they had hardly addressed him at all, he felt an acute desire to know them. When they went to look at the studio lists, he was glad to find they were all in the same group.

After a short time the students began to move out into the stone-walled courtyard, where tall trees overshadowed rows of wooden benches. One student carried a lectern to a small paved area at the front, and the others sat down on the benches. From beyond the stone courtyard walls came the rush and hum of traffic. But Andras was here inside, sitting beside three men whose names he knew; he was one of these students, and he belonged on this side of the wall. He tried to take note of the feeling, tried to imagine how he might write about it to Tibor, to Mátyás. But before he could put the words together in his mind, a door opened in the side of the building and a man strode out. He looked as though he could have been a military captain; he wore a long gray cloak lined in red, and sported a short triangular beard with wax-curled moustaches. His eyes were narrow and fierce behind rimless pince-nez. In one hand he carried a walking stick, and in the other what looked like a jagged gray rock. Any other man, it seemed to Andras, would have had to bow under the weight of the thing, but this man crossed the courtyard with his back straight and his chin set at a martial angle. He stepped up to the lectern and set the rock down upon it with a hollow thud.

“Attention,” he bellowed.

The students fell silent and came to attention, their backs straightening as if they had been pulled by invisible strings. Quietly, a tall young man in a frayed work shirt slid onto the bench beside Andras and bent his head toward Andras’s ear.

“That’s Auguste Perret,” the young man said in Hungarian. “He was my teacher, and now he’ll be yours.”

Andras looked at the young man in surprise and relief. “You’re the one who wrote the note in my packet,” he said.

“Listen,” the man said, “and I’ll translate.”

Andras listened. At the lectern, Auguste Perret lifted the jagged rock in both hands and asked a question. The question, according to Andras’s translator, was whether anyone knew what this building material was. You there, in front? Concrete, that was correct. Reinforced concrete. By the time they finished their five years at the school, all of them would know everything there was to know about reinforced concrete. Why? Because it was the future of the modern city. It would make buildings that surpassed in height and strength anything that had been built before. Height and strength, yes; and beauty. Here at the École Spéciale we were not seduced by beauty, however; leave that to the sons of privilege at that other school. That school was a gentlemen’s institution, a place where boys went to play at the art of dessinage; we at the École Spéciale were interested in real architecture, buildings that people could inhabit. If our designs were beautiful, so much the better; but let them be beautiful in a manner that belonged to the common man. We were here because we believed in architecture as a democratic art; because we believed that form and function were of equal importance; because we, the avantgarde, had shrugged off the bonds of aristocratic tradition and had begun to think for ourselves. Let anyone who wanted to build Versailles stand now and go through that gate. That other school was only three Métro stops away.

The professor paused, his arm flung toward the gate, his eyes fixed on the rows of students. “Non?” he shouted. “Pas un?”

No one moved. The professor stood statuelike before them. Andras had the sense of being a figure in a painting, paralyzed for all eternity by Perret’s challenge. People would admire the painting in museums centuries from now. Still he would be sitting on the bench, inclined slightly toward this man with the cape and the white beard, this general among architects.

“He gives this speech every year,” the Hungarian man next to Andras whispered. “Next he’ll talk about your responsibility to the students who will come after you.”

“Les étudiants qui viennent après vous,” the professor went on, and the Hungarian translated. Those students were relying upon you to study assiduously. If you did not, they, too, would fail. You would be taught by those who came before you; at the École Spéciale you would learn collaboration, because your life as an architect would involve close work with others. You might have your own vision, but without the help of your colleagues that vision wasn’t worth the paper it was drawn upon. In this school, Emile Trélat had instructed Robert Mallet-Stevens, Mallet-Stevens had instructed Fernand Fenzy, Fernand Fenzy had instructed Pierre Vago, and Pierre Vago would instruct you.

At that, the professor pointed into the audience, and the young man beside Andras stood up and made a polite bow. He strode to the front of the assembly, took his place beside Professor Perret at the lectern, and began addressing the students in French. Pierre Vago. This man who had been translating for Andras-this rumpled-looking young man in an inkstained work shirt-was the P. VAGO of Andras’s class schedule. His studio leader. His professor. A Hungarian. Andras felt suddenly faint. For the first time it seemed to him he might have a chance of surviving at the École Spéciale. He could hardly concentrate on what Pierre Vago was saying now, in his elegant, slightly accented French. Pierre Vago had indeed been the one who’d written the Hungarian note in Andras’s manila envelope. Pierre Vago, it occurred to Andras, was probably the one man responsible for his being there at all.

“Hey,” Rosen said, pulling Andras’s sleeve. “Regardes-toi.”

In the excitement, Andras’s nose had begun to bleed. Red spots glistened on his white shirt. Polaner looked at him with concern and offered a handkerchief; Ben Yakov went pale and turned away. Andras took the handkerchief and pressed it against his nose. Rosen made him tip his head back. A few people turned to see what was going on. Andras sat bleeding into the handkerchief, not caring who was looking, happier than he’d ever been in his life.

Later that day, after the assembly, after Andras’s nosebleed had stopped and he’d traded his own clean handkerchief for the one he’d bled upon, after the first meeting of the studio groups, and after he’d exchanged addresses with Rosen, Polaner, and Ben Yakov, Andras found himself in Vago’s cluttered office, sitting on a wooden stool beside the drafting table. On the walls were sketched and printed plans, black-and-white watercolors of beautiful and impossible buildings, a scale drawing of a city from high above. In one corner was a heap of paint-stained clothes; a rusted, twisted bicycle frame leaned against the wall. Vago’s bookshelves held ancient books and glossy magazines and a teakettle and a small wooden airplane and a skinny-legged junk sculpture of a girl. Vago himself leaned back in his swivel chair, his fingers laced behind his head.

“So,” he said to Andras. “Here you are, fresh from Budapest. I’m glad you came. I didn’t know if you’d be able to make it on such short notice. But I had to try. It’s barbarous, those prejudices about who can study what, and when, and how. It’s not a country for men like us.”

“But-forgive me-are you Jewish, Professor?”

“No. I’m a Catholic. Educated in Rome.” He gave his R a deep Italianate roll.

“Then why do you care, sir?”

“Shouldn’t I care?”

“Many don’t.”

Vago shrugged. “Some do.” He opened a folder on his desk. There, in full color, were reproductions of Andras’s covers for Past and Future: linoleum prints of a scribe inking a scroll, a father and his boys at synagogue, a woman lighting two slender candles. Andras saw the work now as if for the first time. The subjects seemed sentimental, the compositions obvious and childish. He couldn’t believe this was what had earned his admission to the school. He hadn’t had a chance to submit the portfolio he’d used for his applications to Hungarian architectural colleges-detailed drawings of the Parliament and the Palace, measured renderings of the interiors of churches and libraries, work he’d slaved over for hours at his desk at Past and Future. But he suspected that even those pieces would have seemed clumsy and amateurish in comparison to Vago’s work, the crisp plans and gorgeous elevations pinned to the walls.

“I’m here to learn, sir,” Andras said. “I made those prints a long time ago.”

“This is excellent work,” Vago said. “There’s a precision, an accuracy of perspective, rare in an untrained artist. You’ve got great natural skill, that’s apparent. The compositions are asymmetrical but well balanced. The themes are ancient but the lines are modern. Good qualities to bring to your work in architecture.”

Andras reached for one of the covers, the one that showed a man and boys at prayer. He’d carved the linoleum original by candlelight in the apartment on Hársfa utca. Though he hadn’t considered it at the time-and why not, when it was so clear now?-this man in the tallis was his father, the boys his brothers.

“It’s fine work,” Vago said. “I wasn’t the only one who thought so.”

“It’s not architecture,” Andras said, and handed the cover back to Vago.

“You’ll learn architecture. And in the meantime you’ll study French. There’s no other way to survive here. I can help you, but I can’t translate for you in every class. So you will come here every morning, an hour before studio, and practice your French with me.”

“Here with you, sir?”

“Yes. From now on we will speak only French. I’ll teach you all I know. And for God’s sake, you will cease to call me ‘sir,’ as if I were an army officer.” His eyes assumed a serious expression, but he twisted his mouth to the left in a French-looking moue. “L’architecture n’est pas un jeu d’enfants,” he said in a deep, resonant voice that matched exactly, both in pitch and tone, the voice of Professor Perret. “L’architecture, c’est l’art le plus sériuex de tous.”

“L’art le plus sérieux de tous,” Andras repeated in the same deep tone.

“Non, non!” Vago cried. “Only I am permitted the voice of Monsieur le Directeur. You will please speak in the manner of Andras the lowly student. My name is Andras the Lowly Student,” Vago said in French. “If you please: repeat.”

“My name is Andras the Lowly Student.”

“I shall learn to speak perfect French from Monsieur Vago.”

“I shall learn to speak perfect French from Monsieur Vago.”

“I will repeat everything he says.”

“I will repeat everything he says.”

“Though not in the voice of Monsieur le Directeur.”

“Though not in the voice of Monsieur le Directeur.”

“Let me ask you a question,” Vago said in Hungarian now, his expression earnest. “Have I done the right thing by bringing you here? Are you terribly lonely? Is this all overwhelming?”

“It is overwhelming,” Andras said. “But I find I’m strangely happy.”

“I was miserable when I first got here,” Vago said, settling back in his chair. “I came three weeks after I finished school in Rome, and started at the Beaux-Arts. That school was no place for a person of my temperament. Those first few months were awful! I hated Paris with a passion.” He looked out the office window at the chill gray afternoon. “I walked around every day, taking it all in-the Bastille and the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, Notre-Dame, the Opéra-and cursing every stick and stone of it. After a while I transferred to the École Spéciale. That was when I began to fall in love with Paris. Now I can’t imagine living anyplace else. After a time, you’ll feel that way too.”

“I’m beginning to feel that way already.”

“Just wait,” Vago said, and grinned. “It only gets worse.”

In the mornings he bought his bread at the small boulangerie near his building, and his newspaper from a stand on the corner; when he dropped his coins into the proprietor’s hand, the man would sing a throaty Merci. Back at his apartment he would eat his croissant and drink sweet tea from the empty jam jar. He would look at the photographs in the paper and try to follow the news of the Spanish Civil War, in which the Front Populaire was losing ground now against the Nationalistes. He wouldn’t allow himself to buy a Hungarian expatriate paper to fill in the blanks; the urgency of the news itself eased the effort of translation. Every day came stories of new atrocities: teenaged boys shot in ditches, elderly gentlemen bayoneted in olive orchards, villages firebombed from the air. Italy accused France of violating its own arms embargo; large shipments of Soviet munitions were reaching the Republican army. On the other side, Germany had increased the numbers of its Condor Legion to ten thousand men. Andras read the news with increasing despair, jealous at times of the young men who had run away to fight for the Republican army. Everyone was involved now, he knew; any other view was denial.

With his mind full of horrific images of the Spanish front, he would walk the leaf-littered sidewalks toward the École Spéciale, distracting himself by repeating French architectural terms: toit, fenêtre, porte, mur, corniche, balcon, balustrade, souche de cheminée. At school he learned the difference between stereobate and stylobate, base and entablature; he learned which of his professors secretly preferred the decorative to the practical, and which were adherents to Perret’s cult of reinforced concrete. With his statics class he visited the Sainte-Chapelle, where he learned how thirteenth-century engineers had discovered a way to strengthen the building using iron struts and metal supports; the supports were hidden within the framework of the stained-glass windows that spanned the height of the chapel. As morning light fell in red and blue strands through the glass, he stood at the center of the nave and experienced a kind of holy exaltation. No matter that this was a Catholic church, that its windows depicted Christ and a host of saints. What he felt had less to do with religion than with a sense of harmonious design, the perfect meeting of form and function in that structure. One long vertical space meant to suggest a path to God, or toward a deeper knowledge of the mysteries. Architects had done this, hundreds of years ago.

Pierre Vago, true to his word, tutored Andras every morning for an hour. The French he’d learned at school returned with speed, and within a month he had absorbed far more than he’d ever learned from his master at gimnázium. By mid-October the lessons were nothing more than long conversations; Vago had a talent for finding the subjects that would make Andras talk. He asked Andras about his years in Konyár and Debrecen -what he had studied, what his friends had been like, where he had lived, whom he’d loved. Andras told Vago about Éva Kereny, the girl who had kissed him in the garden of the Déri Museum in Debrecen and then spurned him coldheartedly; he told the story of his mother’s only pair of silk stockings, a Chanukah gift bought with money Andras had earned by taking on his fellow students’ drawing assignments. (The brothers had all been competing to get her the best gift; she’d reacted with such childlike joy when she’d seen the stockings that no one could dispute Andras’s victory. Later that night, Tibor sat on Andras in the yard and mashed his face into the frozen ground, exacting an older brother’s revenge.) Vago, who had no siblings of his own, seemed to like hearing about Mátyás and Tibor; he made Andras recite their histories and translate their letters into French. In particular he took an interest in Tibor’s desire to study medicine in Italy. He had known a young man in Rome whose father had been a professor of medicine at the school in Modena; he would write a few letters, he said, and would see what could be done.

Andras didn’t think much about it when he said it; he knew Vago was busy, and that the international post traveled slowly, and that the gentleman in Rome might not share Vago’s ideas about educating young Hungarian-Jewish men. But one morning Vago met Andras with a letter in hand: He had received word that Professor Turano might be able to arrange for Tibor to matriculate in January.

“My God!” Andras said. “That’s miraculous! How did you do it?”

“I correctly estimated the value of my connections,” Vago said, and smiled.

“I’ve got to wire Tibor right away. Where do I go to send a telegram?”

Vago put up a hand in caution. “I wouldn’t send word just yet,” he said. “It’s still just a possibility. We wouldn’t want to raise his hopes in vain.”

“What are the chances, do you think? What does the professor say?”

“He says he’ll have to petition the admissions board. It’s a special case.”

“You’ll tell me as soon as you hear from him?”

“Of course,” Vago said.

But he had to share the preliminary good news with someone, so he told Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov that night at their student dining club on the rue des Écoles. It was the same club József had recommended when Andras had arrived. For 125 francs a week they received daily dinners that relied heavily upon potatoes and beans and cabbage; they ate in an echoing underground cavern at long tables inscribed with thousands of students’ names. Andras delivered the news about Tibor in his Hungarian-accented French, struggling to be heard above the din. The others raised their glasses and wished Tibor luck.

“What a delicious irony,” Rosen said, once they’d drained their glasses. “Because he’s a Jew, he has to leave a constitutional monarchy to study medicine in a fascist dictatorship. At least he doesn’t have to join us in this fine democracy, where intelligent young men practice the right of free speech with such abandon.” He cut his eyes at Polaner, who looked down at his neat white hands.

“What’s that about?” Ben Yakov said.

“Nothing,” Polaner said.

“What happened?” asked Ben Yakov, who could not stand to be left out of gossip.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” Rosen said. “On the way to school yesterday, Polaner’s portfolio handle broke. We had to stop and fix it with a bit of twine. We were late to morning lecture, as you’ll recall-that was us, coming in at half past ten. We had to sit in the back, next to that second-year, Lemarque-that blond bastard, the snide one from studio. Tell them, Polaner, what he said when we slid into the row.”

Polaner laid his spoon beside the soup bowl. “What you thought he said.”

“He said filthy Jews. I heard it, plain as day.”

Ben Yakov looked at Polaner. “Is that true?”

“I don’t know,” Polaner said. “He said something, but I didn’t hear what.”

“We both heard it. Everyone around us did.”

“You’re paranoid,” Polaner said, the delicate skin around his eyes flushing red. “People turned around because we were late, not because he’d called us filthy Jews.”

“Maybe it’s all right where you come from, but it’s not all right here,” Rosen said.

“I’m not going to talk about it.”

“Anyway, what can you do?” said Ben Yakov. “Certain people will always be idiots.”

“Teach him a lesson,” Rosen said. “That’s what.”

“No,” Polaner said. “I don’t want trouble over something that may or may not have happened. I just want to keep my head down. I want to study and get my degree. Do you understand?”

Andras did. He remembered that feeling from primary school in Konyár, the desire to become invisible. But he hadn’t anticipated that he or any of his Jewish classmates would feel it in Paris. “I understand,” he said. “Still, Lemarque shouldn’t feel”-he struggled to find the French words-“like he can get away with saying a thing like that. If he did say it, that is.”

“Lévi knows what I mean,” Rosen said. But then he lowered his chin onto his hand and stared into his soup bowl. “On the other hand, I’m not at all sure what we’re supposed to do about it. If we told someone, it would be our word against Lemarque’s. And he’s got a lot of friends among the fourth- and fifth-years.”

Polaner pushed his bowl away. “I have to get back to the studio. I’ve got a whole night’s worth of work to do.”

“Come on, Eli,” Rosen said. “Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not angry. I just don’t want trouble, that’s all.” Polaner put on his hat and slung his scarf around his neck, and they watched him make his way through the maze of tables, his shoulders curled beneath the worn velvet of his jacket.

“You believe me, don’t you?” Rosen said to Andras. “I know what I heard.”

“I believe you. But I agree there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Weren’t we talking about your brother a moment ago?” Ben Yakov said. “I liked that line of conversation better.”

“That’s right,” Rosen said. “I changed the subject, and look what happened.”

Andras shrugged. “According to Vago, it’s too early to celebrate anyway. It may not happen after all.”

“But it may,” Rosen said.

“Yes. And then, as you pointed out, he’ll go live in a fascist dictatorship. So it’s hard to know what to hope for. Every scenario is complicated.”

“ Palestine,” Rosen said. “A Jewish state. That’s what we can hope for. I hope your brother does get to study in Italy under Mussolini. Let him take his medical degree under Il Duce’s nose. Meanwhile you and Polaner and Ben Yakov and I will get ours in architecture here in Paris. And then we’ll all emigrate. Agreed?”

“I’m not a Zionist,” Andras said. “ Hungary ’s my home.”

“Not at the moment, though, is it?” Rosen said. And Andras found it impossible to argue with that.

For the next two weeks he waited for news from Modena. In statics he calculated the distribution of weight along the curved underside of the Pont au Double, hoping to find some distraction in the symmetry of equations; in drawing class he made a scaled rendering of the façade of the Gare d’Orsay, gratefully losing himself in measurements of its intricate clock faces and its line of arched doorways. In studio he kept an eye on Lemarque, who could often be seen casting inscrutable looks at Polaner, but who said nothing that could have been construed as a slur. Every morning in Vago’s office he eyed the letters on the desk, looking for one that bore an Italian postmark; day after day the letter failed to arrive.

Then one afternoon as Andras was sitting in studio, erasing feathery pencil marks from his drawing of the d’Orsay, beautiful Lucia from the front office came to the classroom with a folded note in her hand. She gave the note to the fifth-year monitor who was overseeing that session, and left without a look at any of the other students.

“Lévi,” said the monitor, a stern-eyed man with hair like an explosion of blond chaff. “You’re wanted at the private office of Le Colonel.”

All talk in the room ceased. Pencils hung midair in students’ hands. Le Colonel was the school’s nickname for Auguste Perret. All eyes turned toward Andras; Lemarque shot him a thin half smile. Andras swept his pencils into his bag, wondering what Perret could want with him. It occurred to him that Perret might be involved with Tibor’s chances in Italy; perhaps Vago had enlisted his help. Maybe he’d exerted some kind of influence with friends abroad, and now he was going to be the one to deliver the news.

Andras ran up the two flights of stairs to the corridor that housed the professors’ private offices, and paused outside Perret’s closed door. From inside he could hear Perret and Vago speaking in lowered voices. He knocked. Vago called for him to enter, and he opened the door. Inside, standing in a shaft of light near one of the long windows that overlooked the boulevard Raspail, was Professor Perret in his shirtsleeves. Vago leaned against Perret’s desk, a telegram in his hand.

“Good afternoon, Andras,” Perret said, turning from the window. He motioned for Andras to sit in a low leather chair beside the desk. Andras sat, letting his schoolbag slide to the floor. The air in Perret’s office was close and still. Unlike Vago’s office, with its profusion of drawings on the walls and its junk sculptures and its worktable overflowing with projects, Perret’s was all order and austerity. Three pencils lay parallel on the Morocco-topped desk; wooden shelves held neatly rolled plans; a crisp white model of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées stood in a glass box on a console table.

Perret cleared his throat and began. “We’ve had some disturbing news from Hungary. Rather disturbing indeed. It may be easier if Professor Vago explains it to you in Hungarian. Though I hear your French has advanced considerably.” The martial tone had dropped from his voice, and he gave Andras such a kind and regretful look that Andras’s hands went cold.

“It’s rather complicated,” Vago said, speaking in Hungarian. “Let me try to explain. I received word from my friend’s father, the professor. A place came through for your brother at the medical college in Modena.”

Vago paused. Andras held his breath and waited for him to go on.

“Professor Turano sent a letter to the Jewish organization that provides your scholarship. He wanted to see if money could be found for Tibor, too. But his request was denied, with regrets. New restrictions have been imposed this week in Hungary: As of today, no organization can send money to Jewish students abroad. Your Hitközség’s student-aid funds have been frozen by the government.”

Andras blinked at him, trying to understand what he meant.

“It’s not just a problem for Tibor,” Vago continued, looking into Andras’s eyes. “It’s also a problem for you. In short, your scholarship can no longer be paid. To be honest, my young friend, your scholarship has never been paid. Your first month’s check never arrived, so I paid your fees out of my own pocket, thinking there must have been some temporary delay.” He paused, glancing at Professor Perret, who was watching as Vago delivered the news in Hungarian. “Monsieur Perret doesn’t know where the money came from, and need not know, so please don’t betray surprise. I told him everything was fine. However, I’m not a rich man, and, though I wish I could, I can’t pay your tuition and fees another month.”

An ice floe ascended through Andras’s chest, slow and cold. His tuition could no longer be paid. His tuition had never been paid. All at once he understood Perret’s kindness and regret.

“We think you’re a bright student,” Perret said in French. “We don’t want to lose you. Can your family help?”

“My family?” Andras’s voice sounded thready and vague in the high-ceilinged room. He saw his father stacking oak planks in the lumberyard, his mother cooking potato paprikás at the stove in the outdoor kitchen. He thought of the pair of gray silk stockings, the ones he’d given her ten years earlier for Chanukah-how she’d folded them into a chaste square and stored them in their paper wrapping, and had worn them only to synagogue. “My family doesn’t have that kind of money,” he said.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Perret said. “I wish there were something we could do. Before the depression we gave out a great many scholarships, but now…” He looked out the window at the low clouds and stroked his military beard. “Your expenses are paid until the end of the month. We’ll see what we can do before then, but I’m afraid I can’t offer much hope.”

Andras translated the words in his mind: not much hope.

“As for your brother,” Vago said, “it’s a damned shame. Turano wanted very much to help him.”

He tried to shake himself from the shock that had come over him. It was important that they understand about Tibor, about the money. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “The scholarship doesn’t matter-for Tibor, I mean. He’s been putting money away for six years. He’s got to have enough for the train ticket and his first year’s tuition. I’ll cable him tonight. Can your friend’s father hold the place for him?”

“I’d imagine so,” Vago said. “I’ll write to him at once, if you think it’s possible. But perhaps your brother can help you, too, if he’s got some money put away.”

Andras shook his head. “I can’t tell him. He hasn’t saved enough for both of us.”

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Perret said again, coming forward to shake Andras’s hand. “Professor Vago tells me you’re a resourceful young man. Perhaps you’ll find a way through this. I’ll see what I can do on our side.”

This was the first time Perret had touched him. It was as though Andras had just been told he had a terminal disease, as though the shadow of impending death had allowed Perret to dispense with formalities. He clapped Andras on the back as he led him to the door of the office. “Courage,” he said, giving Andras a salute, and turned him out into the hall.

Andras went down through the dusty yellow light of the staircase, past the classroom where his Gare d’Orsay drawing lay abandoned on the table, past the beautiful Lucia in the front office, and through the blue doors of the school he had come to think of as his own. He 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 MODENA, GRATIAS FRIEND OF VAGO. OBTAIN PASSPORT AND VISAS AT ONCE. HURRAH! For a moment, in a fog of self-pity, he considered omitting the HURRAH. 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 École Spéciale.

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 gimnázium, 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 Dohány 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 Mátyás Templom and the Basilica of Szent István 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 Konyár 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-Mátyás 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 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 Écoles, he was already framing the necessary phrase in his head: I’m looking for a job. In Hungarian, Állást keresek. In French, Je cherche…je cherche… a job. He knew the word: un boulot.

CHAPTER FIVE. Théâtre 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 Châtelet. 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 attaché. Into these vaguely embarrassing circumstances, Madame Villareal-Bloch’s understudy had been called at the last moment to take over the part. Marcelle Gérard 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 Gérard, 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, Zoltán Novak drank Scotch neat and wondered what would happen to him if the play could not go forward, if Marcelle Gérard 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, Zoltán 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 Gérard’s name had been misspelled in the program for tomorrow night (Guérard, 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? Something foreign. Lévi. Undrash.

Buy new shovels for the workers. Leave the programs as they were-too expensive to reprint. And no, he didn’t know a Lévi Undrash. Even if he did, God help him, the last thing he had for anyone right now was a job.

Andras had planned to arrive at school on Monday morning with triumphant news for Professor Vago: He had found a job, had arranged to pay his tuition, and would therefore remain at school. Instead he found himself trudging down the boulevard Raspail in twig-kicking frustration. All weekend he had scoured the Latin Quarter in search of work; he had inquired at front doors and back doors, in bakeshops and garages; he had even dared to knock on the door of a graphic design shop where a young man sat working in his shirtsleeves at a drafting table. The man had stared at Andras with a kind of bemused contempt and told him to stop in again once he’d earned his degree. Andras had walked on, hungry and chilled by rain, refusing to capitulate. He had crossed the Seine in a fog, trying to imagine who he might call upon for help; when he looked up he saw that he’d walked all the way to the place du Châtelet. It occurred to him then that he might present himself at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt and ask to see Zoltán Novak, who had, after all, invited Andras to stop by. He could go that very moment; it was half past seven, and Novak might be at the theater before the show. But at the Sarah-Bernhardt he’d been turned away-politely, regretfully, and with a great deal of rapid, sympathetic French-by a young man who claimed to have spoken directly to Novak, who hadn’t recognized Andras’s name. Andras had spent the rest of that evening and all the next day searching for work, but his luck hadn’t improved. In the end he’d found himself back at home, sitting at the table by the window, holding a telegram from his brother.

U NBELIEVABLE NEWS! T HANKS FOREVER TO YOU & V AGO. W ILL APPLY STUDENT VISA TOMORROW. M ODENA. H URRAH! T IBOR

He would have given anything to see Tibor, to tell him what had happened and hear what he thought Andras should do. But Tibor was twelve hundred kilometers away in Budapest. There was no way to ask or receive advice of that kind by telegram, and a letter would take far too long. He had, of course, told Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov at the student dining club that weekend; their anger on his behalf had been gratifying, their sympathy fortifying, but there was little they could do to help. In any case, they weren’t his brother; they couldn’t have Tibor’s understanding of what the scholarship meant to him, nor what its loss would mean.

At seven o’clock in the morning the École Spéciale was deserted. The studios were silent, the courtyard empty, the amphitheater an echoing void. He knew he could find a few students asleep at their desks if he looked, students who had stayed up all night drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and working on drawings or models. Sleepless nights were commonplace at the École Spéciale. There were rumors of pills that sharpened your mind and allowed you to stay up for days, for weeks. There were legends of artistic breakthroughs occurring after seventy-two waking hours. And there were tales of disastrous collapse. One studio was called l’atelier du suicide. The older students told the younger about a man who’d shot himself after his rival won the annual Prix du Amphithéâtre. In that particular studio, on the wall beside the chalkboard, you could see a blasted-out hollow in the brick. When Andras had asked Vago about the suicide, Vago said that the story had been told when he was a student, too, and that no one could confirm it. But it served its purpose as a cautionary tale.

A light was on in Vago’s office; Andras could see the yellow square of it from the courtyard. He ran up the three flights and knocked. There was a long silence before Vago opened the door; he stood before Andras in his stocking feet, rubbing his eyes with an inky thumb and forefinger. His collar was open, his hair a wild tangle. “You,” he said, in Hungarian. A small word, salted with a grain of affection. Te.

“Me,” Andras said. “Still here, for now.”

Vago ushered him into the office and motioned him to sit down on the usual stool. Then he left Andras alone for a few minutes, after which he returned looking as if he’d washed his face in hot water and scrubbed it with a rough towel. He smelled of the pumice soap that was good for getting ink off one’s hands.

“Well?” Vago said, and seated himself behind the desk.

“Tibor sends his deepest thanks. He’s applying for his visa now.”

“I’ve already written to Professor Turano.”

“Thank you,” Andras said. “Truly.”

“And how are you?”

“Not very well, as you can imagine.”

“Worried about how you’re going to pay your tuition.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

Vago pushed back his chair and went to look out the window. After a moment he turned back and put his hands through his hair. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t feel much like teaching you French this morning. Why don’t we take a field trip instead? We’ve got a good hour and a half before studio.”

“You’re the professor,” Andras said.

Vago took his coat from its wooden peg and put it on. He pushed Andras through the door ahead of him, followed him down the stairs, and steered him through the blue front doors of the school. Out on the boulevard he fished in his pocket for change; he led Andras down the stairs of the Raspail Métro just as a train flew into the station. They rode to Motte-Picquet and transferred to the 8, then changed again at Michel-Ange Molitor. Finally, at an obscure stop called Billancourt, Vago led Andras off the train and up onto a suburban boulevard. The air was fresher here outside the city center; shopkeepers sprayed the sidewalks in preparation for the morning’s business, and window-washers polished the avenue’s glass storefronts. A line of girls in short black woolen coats stepped briskly along the sidewalk, led by a matron with a feather in her hat.

“Not far now,” Vago said. He led Andras down the boulevard and turned onto a smaller commercial street, then onto a long residential street, then onto a smaller residential street lined with gray duplexes and sturdy red-roofed houses, which yielded suddenly to a soaring white ship of an apartment building, triangular, built on a shard of land where two streets met at an acute angle. The apartments had porthole windows and deep-set balconies with sliding-glass doors, as if the building really were an ocean liner; it lanced forward through the morning behind a prow of curving windows and milk-white arcs of reinforced concrete.

“Architect?” Vago said.

“Pingusson.” A few weeks earlier they had gone to see his work in the design pavilion at the International Exposition; the fifth-year student who had been their guide had declaimed about the simplicity of Pingusson’s lines and his unconventional sense of proportion.

“That’s right,” Vago said. “One of ours-an École Spéciale man. I met him at an architecture convention in Russia five years ago, and he’s been a good friend ever since. He’s written some sharp pieces for L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Pieces that got people to read the magazine when it was just getting off the ground. He’s also a hell of a poker player. We’ve got a regular Saturday night game. Sometimes Professor Perret pays us a visit-he can’t play worth a damn, but he likes to talk.”

“I can imagine that,” Andras said.

“Well, now, this Saturday night, guess what the talk was about?”

Andras shrugged.

“Not a guess?”

“The Spanish Civil War.”

“No, my young friend. We talked about you. Your problem. The scholarship. Your lack of funds”. Meanwhile, Perret kept pouring champagne. A first-rate ’26 Canard-Duchêne he received as a gift from a client. Now, Georges-Henri-that’s Pingusson-he’s an uncommonly intelligent man. He’s responsible for a lot of very fine buildings here in Paris and has a houseful of awards to show for them. He’s an engineer, too, you know, not just an architect. He plays poker like a man who knows numbers. But when he drinks champagne, he’s all bravado and romance. Around midnight he threw his bankbook on the table and told Perret that if he, Perret, won the next hand, then he-Pingusson, I mean-would pitch in for your tuition and fees.

Andras stared at Vago. “What happened?”

“Perret lost, of course. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him beat Pingusson. But the champagne had already done its work. He’s a smart one, our Perret. In the end, smarter than Pingusson.”

“What do you mean?”

“Afterward, we’re all standing on the street trying to get a cab. Perret’s sober as an owl, shaking his head. ‘Terrible shame about the Lévi boy,’ he says. ‘Tragic thing.’ And Georges-Henri, drunk on champagne-he practically goes to his knees on the sidewalk and begs Perret to let him stand you a loan. Fifty percent, he says, and not a centime less. ‘If the boy can come up with the other half,’ he says, ‘let him stay in school.’”

“You can’t be serious,” Andras said.

“I’m afraid so.”

“But he came to his senses the next morning.”

“No. Perret made him put it in writing that night. He owes Perret, in any case. The man’s done him more than a few favors.”

“And what kind of security does he want for the loan?”

“None,” Vago said. “Perret told him you were a gentleman. And that you’d earn plenty once you graduated.”

“Fifty percent,” Andras said. “Good God. From Pingusson.” He looked up again at the curving profile of the building, its soaring white prow. “Tell me you’re not joking.”

“I’m not joking. I’ve got the signed letter on my desk.”

“But that’s thousands of francs.”

“Perret convinced him you were worth helping.”

He felt his throat closing. He was not going to cry, not here on a street corner at Boulogne-Billancourt. He scuffed the sole of his shoe against the sidewalk. There had to be a way to come up with the other half. If Perret had worked magic for him, if he had made something for him out of nothing, if he considered him a gentleman, the least Andras could do was to meet the challenge of Pingusson’s loan. He would do whatever he had to do. How long had he spent looking for a job? A few days? Fourteen hours? The city of Paris was a vast place. He would find work. He had to.

There were times when a good-natured ghost seemed to inhabit the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, times when a play should have fallen apart but didn’t. On the evening of Marcelle Gérard’s début as the Mother, all had seemed poised for disaster; an hour before curtain Marcelle appeared in Novak’s office and threatened to quit. She wasn’t ready to go on, she told him. She would embarrass herself in front of her public, the critics, the minister of culture. Novak took her hands and implored her to be reasonable. He knew she could perform the role. She had been flawless in the audition. The part had gone to Claudine Villareal-Bloch only because Novak hadn’t wanted to show favoritism toward Madame Gérard. Their affair may have been long past now, but people still talked; he’d been afraid that word would get back to his wife at a time when things were already delicate between them. Marcelle understood that, of course; hadn’t they discussed it when the decision had been made? He would never have considered allowing her to go on tonight if he didn’t think she would be perfect. Her fears were normal, after all. Hadn’t Sarah Bernhardt herself overcome a paralyzing bout of stage fright in her 1879 portrayal of Phèdre? He knew without a doubt that as soon as Marcelle set foot onstage she would become Brecht’s vision of the role. She must know it too. Didn’t she? But when he’d finished, Madame Gérard had pulled her hands away and retired to her dressing room without a word, leaving Novak alone.

Perhaps it was the earnest force of his worry that called Sarah Bernhardt’s ghost out of the walls of the theater that night; perhaps it was the collective worry of the cast and crew, the lighting men, the ushers, the costumers, the janitors, the coat-check girl. Whatever the reason, by the time the nine o’ clock hour struck, Marcelle Gérard’s hesitation had vanished. The minister of culture sat in his box, tippling discreetly from a silver flask; Lady Mendl and the honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes were with him, Lady Mendl with peacock feathers in her hair, Daisy Fellowes resplendent in a Schiaparelli suit of jade-green silk. The war in Spain had made communist theater fashionable in France. The house was packed. The lights dimmed. And then Marcelle Gérard stepped onto the stage and spoke as if in the plum-toned voice of Sarah Bernhardt herself. From his place in the wings, Zoltán Novak watched as Madame Gérard called forth a rendition of The Mother that put Claudine Villareal-Bloch’s love-addled performances to shame. He breathed a sigh of relief so pleasurable, so deep, he was glad his wife had denied him the chest-constricting comfort of his cigarettes. With any luck, he had left his consumption behind for good. The time he’d spent back home in Budapest at the medicinal baths had flushed the blood and pain from his lungs. The play had not failed. And his theater might survive after all-who knew-despite the long red columns in its ledger books and the debts that increased persistently each week.

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 inner sanctum and kissed him on the mouth, just once, almost chastely, as if everything were forgiven. At midnight he pushed through the stage door into a fine sharp mist. His wife would be waiting for him in the bedroom at home, her hair undone, her skin scented with lavender. But he hadn’t moved three steps in her direction before someone rushed him from behind and grabbed his arm, making him drop his briefcase. There had been a spate of muggings outside the theater of late; he was generally cautious, but tonight the champagne had made him careless. Acting upon instincts he’d developed in the war, he swung around and struck his assailant in the stomach. A dark-haired young man fell gasping to the curb. Zoltán Novak stooped to pick up the briefcase, and it was only then that he heard what the boy was gasping. Novak-úr. Novak-úr. His own name, with its Hungarian honorific. The young man’s face seemed vaguely familiar. Novak helped him to his feet and brushed some wet leaves from his sleeve. The young man touched his lower ribs gingerly.

“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 Vienna, his gratitude when Novak had bought him a pretzel. And now he’d punched the poor boy in the stomach. Novak shook his head and gave a low, rueful laugh. “Mr. Lévi,” he said. “My deepest apologies.”

“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, beginning with how he’d gotten the scholarship and lost it, and finishing with the offer from Pingusson. That was what had brought him back here. He had to try to see Novak again. He was willing to perform the meanest of jobs. He would do anything. He would black the actors’ shoes or sweep the floors or empty the ash cans. He had to start earning his fifty percent. The first payment was due in three weeks.

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 dinners ordered. Occasionally they needed the services of a dentist or a doctor. They had to run lines and take quick restorative naps. They had to cultivate their offstage romances. Two of the men were in love with two of the women, and the two beloved women each loved the wrong man. Notes flew between the enamored parties. Flowers were sent, received, destroyed; chocolates were sent and consumed.

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 dinner, an advance against your first week’s pay.” Novak handed Andras a few folded bills. “Get something more substantial than a pretzel,” he said, and went off down the hall to his office, rubbing the back of his neck.

Andras unfolded the bills. Two hundred fifty francs, enough for two weeks’ dinners at the student dining club. He gave a low whistle of relief and tucked the bills into his jacket pocket.

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.

“You’re new here,” she said. “What is your name?”

“Andras Lévi,” said Andras, with a slight bow.

She repeated his name twice, as if to commit it to memory. “A pleasure to meet you, Andras Lévi. Thank you for seeing about the car.” She climbed inside, drew her coat around her legs, and closed the door.

As he watched the cab make its way down the quai de Gesvres toward the Pont d’Arcole, he found himself replaying the brief script of their conversation. In his mind he heard her saying très heureux de faire votre connaissance, which meant örülök, hogy megismerhetem in Hungarian. How was it that he seemed to have heard an echo of örülök beneath her très heureux? Was everyone in Paris secretly Hungarian? He laughed aloud to think of it: all the Right Bank women in their fur coats, the theatergoers in their long cars, the jazz-loving art students in their fraying jackets, all nursing a secret hunger for paprikás and peasant bread as they ate their bouillabaisse and baguettes. As he walked across the river he felt a rising lightness at the center of his chest. He had a job. He would earn his fifty percent. New pencils lay sharp on his worktable, and it seemed not impossible that he might finish his drawings of the d’Orsay before morning.

He worked all night without pause and managed to stay awake through his morning classes. Then he fell asleep in a corner of the library and didn’t wake for hours. When he did, he found a note pinned to his lapel in Rosen’s handwriting: Meet us at the Blue Dove at 5, you lazy ass. Andras sat up and dug his knuckles into his eyes. He pulled his father’s watch from his pocket and checked the time. Four o’clock. In three hours he would have to be back at work. All he wanted was to go home to his bed. He shuffled out into the hall and went to the men’s room, where he found that his upper lip had been inked with a Clark Gable-style moustache while he slept. Leaving the moustache in place, he combed his hair with his fingers and tugged his jacket straight.

The Blue Dove Café was a good half-hour walk up the boulevard Raspail and across the Latin Quarter. Andras was the first to arrive; he took a table at the back, near the bar, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a pot of tea. The tea came with two butter biscuits with an almond pressed into the center of each. That was why students liked the Blue Dove: It was generous. In the Latin Quarter it was a rarity to receive two biscuits with a pot of tea, much less almond biscuits. By the time he’d finished the tea and eaten the biscuits, Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov had arrived. They unwound their scarves and pulled chairs up to the table.

Rosen kissed Andras on both cheeks. “Gorgeous moustache,” he said.

“We thought you were dead,” said Ben Yakov. “Or at least in a coma.”

“I was nearly dead.”

“We took bets,” Ben Yakov said. “Rosen bet you’d sleep all night. I bet you’d meet us here. Polaner abstained, because he’s broke.”

Polaner blushed. Of the three of them he came from the wealthiest family, but his family’s kingdom was a garment business in Kraków and his father had no idea how much things really cost in Paris. Every month he sent Polaner not quite enough to keep him clothed and fed. Acutely aware of his growing debt to his father, Polaner couldn’t bear to ask him for more. As a child of privilege he had never worked, and seemed never to consider taking a job as a possible means to ease his situation. Instead he ordered hot water at cafés and patched his shoes with thick pasteboard left over from model-building and saved extra bread from the student dining club.

With his pocket full of bills, Andras knew it was his turn to buy everyone a drink. They all had tiny glasses of whiskey and soda, the drink of American movie stars. They cursed the Hungarian government and its attempt to remove Andras from their company, and then toasted his new role as the courier of actors’ love notes and the walker of actors’ dogs. When the whiskey-and-sodas were gone, they ordered another large pot of tea.

“Ben Yakov has an assignation tonight,” Rosen announced.

“What do you mean, an assignation?” Andras said.

“A rendezvous. A meeting. Possibly romantic in nature.”

“With whom?”

“Only with the beautiful Lucia,” Rosen said, and Ben Yakov laced his fingers and flexed them in mute glory. A hush fell over the table. They all revered Lucia, with her deep velvet voice and her skin the color of polished mahogany. At night, alone in their beds, they had all imagined her stepping out of her dress and slip, standing naked before them in their darkened rooms. By day they had been shamed by her talent in studio. She didn’t just work in the office; she was a fourth-year student, one of the best in her class, and it was rumored that Mallet-Stevens had particularly praised her work.

“Cheers to Ben Yakov,” Andras said, raising his cup.

“Cheers,” said the others. Ben Yakov raised a hand in mock modesty.

“Of course, he’ll never tell us what happens,” Rosen said. “Ben Yakov’s affairs are his own.”

“Unlike Monsieur Rosen’s,” said Ben Yakov. “Monsieur Rosen’s affairs belong to everyone. If only your ladies knew!”

“It’s the city of love,” Rosen said. “We should all be making love.” He used the vulgar word for it, baiser. “What’s wrong, Polaner? Do I offend?”

“I’m not listening,” Polaner said.

“Polaner is a gentleman,” said Ben Yakov. “Gentlemen ne baisent pas.”

“On the contrary,” said Andras. “Gentlemen are great baiseurs. I’ve just finished reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It’s full of gentlemen baisent.”

“I’m not sure you’re qualified to enter this conversation,” Rosen said. “At least Polaner had a petite amie back home. His Krakovian bride-to-be, isn’t that right?” He pushed Polaner’s shoulder, and Polaner blushed again; he’d mentioned a few letters from the girl, the daughter of a woolens manufacturer whom his father expected him to marry. “He’s done it all before, whether he likes to talk about it or not,” Rosen said. “But you, Andras, you’ve never done it.”

“That’s a lie,” Andras said, though it was true.

“Paris is full of girls,” Rosen said. “We should arrange an assignation for you. One of a professional nature, I mean.”

“With whose money?” Ben Yakov said.

“Didn’t artists at one time have benefactors?” Rosen said. “Where are our benefactors?” He stood and repeated the question at full volume to the room at large. A few of the other patrons raised their glasses. But there was not a prospective benefactor among them; they were all students, with their pots of tea and two biscuits, their left-leaning newspapers, their threadbare coats.

“At least I have a job,” Andras said.

“Well, save up, save up!” Rosen said. “You can’t stay a virgin forever.”

At work he ran from one task to another like a sous-chef assisting in the preparation of a twelve-course meal, each task ending just as another was beginning, all of it under the mounting pressure of time. Claudel, the assistant stage manager, was Basque and had a temper that often expressed itself in the throwing of props, which would then have to be fixed before they were needed onstage. As a result the props-master had quit, and the props had fallen into disrepair. Claudel terrorized the prompters and the stagehands, the assistant director and the wardrobe mistress; he even terrorized his own superior, the stage manager himself, Monsieur d’Aubigné, who was too afraid of Claudel’s wrath to complain to Monsieur Novak. But particularly Claudel terrorized Andras, who made a point of being close at hand. Andras knew he didn’t mean any harm. Claudel was a perfectionist, and any perfectionist would have been driven mad by the confusion of the Bernhardt backstage. Messages got lost, the masterless props lay about at random, parts of costumes were misplaced; no one ever knew how long it was until curtain or the end of intermission. It seemed a miracle that the show could be performed at all. His first week there, Andras built pigeonholes for the exchange of notes between stage manager, assistant stage manager, director, cast, and crew; he bought two cheap wall clocks and hung them in the wings; he knocked together a few rough shelves, lined up the props upon them, and marked each spot with the act and scene in which the prop was to be used. Within a few days, a sense of tranquility began to emerge backstage. Whole acts would pass without an outburst from Claudel. The stagehands commented upon the change to the stage manager, who commented upon the change to Zoltán Novak, and Novak congratulated Andras. Emboldened by his success, Andras asked for and received seventy-five francs a week to stock a table with coffee and cream and chocolate biscuits and jam and bread for everyone backstage. Soon his mailbox was stuffed with notes of gratitude.

Madame Gérard in particular seemed to have taken a special interest in Andras. She began to call upon him not only to perform her errands, but also for his company. After the show, when the rest of the actors had gone, she liked to have him sit in her dressing room and talk to her while she removed her makeup. Her démaquillage took so long that Andras came to suspect that she dreaded going home. He knew she lived alone, though he didn’t know where; he imagined a rose-colored flat papered with old show posters. She spoke little about her own life, except to tell him that he’d guessed her origins correctly: She had been born in Budapest, and her mother had taught the young Marcelle to speak both French and Hungarian. But she required Andras to speak only French to her; practice was the best way to master the language, she said. She wanted to hear about Budapest, about the job at Past and Future, about his family; he told her about Mátyás’s penchant for dancing, and about Tibor’s impending departure for Modena.

“And does Tibor speak Italian?” she asked as she rubbed cold cream into her forehead. “Has he studied the language?”

“He’ll learn it faster than I learned French. In school he won the Latin prize three years running.”

“And is he eager to leave?”

“Quite eager,” Andras said. “But he can’t go until January.”

“And what else interests him besides medicine?”

“Politics. The state of the world.”

“Well, that’s excusable in a young man. And beyond that? What does he do in his spare time? Does he have a lady friend? Will he have to leave someone behind in Budapest?”

Andras shook his head. “He works night and day. There’s no spare time.”

“Indeed,” said Madame Gérard, swiping at her cheeks with a pink velvet sponge. She turned a look of bemused inquiry upon Andras, her eyebrows raised in their narrow twin arcs. “And what about you?” she said. “You must have a little friend.”

Andras blushed profoundly. He had never discussed the subject with any adult woman, not even his mother. “Not a trace of one,” he said.

“I see,” said Madame Gérard. “Then perhaps you won’t object to a lunch invitation from a friend of mine. A Hungarian woman I know, a talented instructress of ballet, has a daughter a few years younger than you. A very handsome girl by the name of Elisabet. She’s tall, blond, brilliant in school-gets high marks in mathematics. Won some sort of city-wide math competition, poor girl. I’m certain she must speak some Hungarian, though she’s emphatically French. She might introduce you to some of her friends.”

A tall blond girl, emphatically French, who spoke Hungarian and might show him another side of Paris: He could hardly say no to that. In the back of his mind he could hear Rosen telling him he couldn’t stay a virgin forever. He found himself saying he’d be delighted to accept the invitation to lunch at the home of Marcelle Gérard’s friend. Madame Gérard wrote the name and address on the back of her own calling card.

“Sunday at noon,” she said. “I can’t be there myself, I’m afraid. I’ve already accepted another invitation. But I assure you you’ve got nothing to fear from Elisabet or her mother.” She handed him the card. “They live not far from here, in the Marais.”

He glanced at the address, wondering if the house were in the part of the Marais he had visited with his history class; then he experienced a sharp mnemonic tug and had to look again. Morgenstern, Madame Gérard had written. 39 rue de Sévigné.

“Morgenstern,” he said aloud.

“Yes. The house is at the corner of the rue d’Ormesson.” And then she seemed to notice something strange about Andras’s expression. “Is there a problem, my dear?”

He had a momentary urge to tell her about his visit to the house on Benczúr utca, about the letter he’d carried to Paris, but he remembered Mrs. Hász’s plea for discretion and recovered quickly. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to appear in polite company, that’s all.”

“You’ll do splendidly,” said Madame Gérard. “You’re more of a gentleman than most gentlemen I know.” She stood and gave him her queenly smile, a kind of private performance of her own authority and elegance; then she drew her Chinese robe around her and retreated behind the gold-painted lindens of her dressing screen.

…

That night he sat on his bed and looked at the card, the address. He knew that the world of Hungarian expatriates in Paris was a finite one, and that Madame Gérard was well connected within it, but he felt nonetheless that this convergence must have some deeper meaning. He was certain his memory was correct; he hadn’t forgotten the name Morgenstern, nor the street name rue de Sévigné. It thrilled him to think he would find out if Tibor had been right when he’d guessed that the letter had been addressed to the elder Mrs. Hász’s former lover. When he arrived at the Morgensterns’, would he encounter a silver-haired gentleman-the father-in-law, perhaps, of Madame Morgenstern-who might be the mysterious C? How were the Hászes of Budapest connected with a ballet teacher in the Marais? And how would he refrain from mentioning any of this to József Hász the next time they met?

But in the days that followed, he found he had little time to think about the approaching visit to the Morgensterns’. Only a month remained before the end of the term, and in three weeks’ time there would be a critique of the students’ fall projects. His project was a model of the Gare d’Orsay, built from his measured drawing; he’d finished the plans but had yet to begin the model itself. He would have to buy materials, study topographical maps so he could build the base, make templates for the forms of the model, cut out the forms, draw the arched windows and clock faces and all the stone detailing, and assemble them into the finished piece. He spent the week in studio surrounded by his plans. At night, after work, he was consumed with preparations for a statics exam, and in the afternoons he attended a series of lectures by Perret on the ill-fated Fonthill Abbey, a nineteenth-century faux cathedral whose tower had collapsed three times due to poor design, hasty construction, and the use of shoddy materials.

By Saturday afternoon when he arrived at work, the only mystery in his mind was how he had managed to reach the day before the luncheon without having had his only white shirt laundered, and without having set aside a few francs for a gift for his hostess. After confessing the problem of his attire to Madame Gérard, he found himself in the workshop of the wardrobe mistress, Madame Courbet, who had constructed all the workers’ clothes and military uniforms required for The Mother. While the revolution unfolded onstage, Madame Courbet had turned her attention to a different struggle: She was sewing fifty tutus for a children’s dance recital that was take place at the Bernhardt that winter. Andras found her sitting amid a storm of white tulle and tiny silk flowers, her sewing machine beating its mechanical thunder at the center of that snowy cumulus. She was a sparrowlike woman past fifty, always dressed in impeccably tailored clothes; today her green wool dress was frosted with icy-looking fibers, and she held a spool of silver-white thread between her fingers. She removed her rimless spectacles to look at Andras.

“Ah, young Mr. Lévi,” she said. “And is it another complaint from Monsieur Claudel, or has someone else split a seam?” She twisted her mouth into a wry moue.

“It’s something for me, actually,” he said. “I’m afraid I need a shirt.”

“A shirt? Are you to have a walk-on in the play?”

“No,” he said, and blushed. “I need a shirt for a luncheon tomorrow.”

“I see.” She lay down the thread and crossed her arms. “That’s not my usual line.”

“I hate to disturb you when you’re already so busy.”

“Madame Gérard sent you, didn’t she.”

Andras confessed that she had.

“That woman,” said Madame Courbet. But she got up from her little chair and stood in front of Andras, looking him up and down. “I wouldn’t do this for just anyone,” she said. “You’re a good young man. They hound you to death here and pay you almost nothing, but you’ve never been short with me. Which is more than I can say for certain people.” She took a tape measure from a table and strapped a pincushion to her wrist. “Now, a gentleman’s shirt, is it? You’ll want a plain white oxford, of course. Nothing fancy.” With a few deft movements she measured Andras’s neck and shoulders and the length of his arm, then went to a wardrobe cabinet marked CHEMISES. From it she extracted a fine white shirt with a crisp collar. She showed Andras how the shirt contained a special pocket inside for a tube of fake blood; in one play, a man had to be stabbed night after night by his wife’s jealous lover, and Madame Courbet had had to make an endless supply of shirts. From a drawer marked CRVT she selected a blue silk tie decorated with partridges. “It’s an aristocrat’s tie,” she said, “a rich man’s tie done up from a scrap. Look.” She turned the tie over to show him how she’d sewn the silk remnant onto a plain cotton backing. Andras put it on along with the shirt, and she pinned the shirt for a swift alteration. At the end of the evening she gave him the finished shirt, wrapped in brown paper. “Don’t let anyone else know where you got this,” she said. “I wouldn’t want the word to get out.” But she pinched his ear affectionately as she sent him on his way.

As he was leaving, he had a sudden inspiration. He went to the grand front entrance of the theater, where Pély, the custodian, was sweeping the marble floor with his push broom. As usual, Pély had set the previous week’s flower arrangements in a row inside the front doors; in the morning they would be picked up by the florist, vases and all, and replaced with new ones. Andras tipped his cap at Pély.

“If no one’s using these flowers,” he said, “may I?”

“Of course! Take them all. Take as many as you like.”

Andras gathered a staggering armload of roses and lilies and chrysanthemums, branches with red berries, faux bluebirds on green twigs, feathery bunches of fern. He would not arrive empty-handed at the Morgensterns’ on the rue de Sévigné; no, not he.

CHAPTER SEVEN. A Luncheon

IT HAD BEEN only a few weeks since Andras had studied the architecture of the Marais with Perret’s class. They had taken a special trip to see the Hôtel de Sens, the fifteenth-century city palace with its turrets and leonine gargoyles, its confusion of rooflines, its cramped and cluttered façade. Andras had expected Perret’s lecture to be a stern critique, a disquisition on the virtues of simplicity. But the lesson had been about the strength of the building, the fine craftsmanship that had allowed it to endure. Perret moved his hand along the stonework of the front entrance, showing the students what care the masons had taken in cutting the voussoirs of the Gothic arches. As he spoke, a pair of Orthodox men had appeared on the street, leading a group of schoolboys in yarmulkes. The two groups of students had stared at each other as they passed. The boys whispered to each other, looking at Perret in his military cloak; a few lagged behind as if to hear what Perret might say next. One boy snapped a salute, and his teacher delivered a reprimand in Yiddish.

Now Andras passed behind the Hôtel de Sens, past the manicured topiary gardens and the raised beds planted with purple kale for winter. Hefting his load of flowers, he sidestepped through the traffic on the rue de Rivoli. In the Marais the streets had an inside feel, almost as if they were part of a movie set. In Cinescope and Le Film Complet, Andras had seen the miniature cities built inside cavernous sound-stages in Los Angeles; here, the pale blue winter sky seemed like the arching roof of a studio, and Andras half expected to see men and women in medieval costume moving between the buildings, trailed by megaphone-wielding directors, by cameramen with their rafts of complicated equipment. There were kosher butchers and Hebrew bookshops and synagogues, all of them with signs written in Yiddish, as though this were a different country within the city. But there was no anti-Semitic graffiti of the kind that regularly appeared in the Jewish Quarter in Budapest. Instead the walls were bare, or plastered with advertisements for soap or chocolate or cigarettes. As Andras entered the tall corridor of the rue de Sévigné, a black taxi roared past, nearly knocking him off his feet. He steadied himself, shifted his vast bouquet from one arm to the other, and checked the address on the card Madame Gérard had given him.

Across the street he could see a windowed shop front with a wooden sign cut into the form of a child ballerina, and beneath it the legend ÉCOLE DE BALLET-MME MORGENSTERN, MAÎTRESSE. He crossed the street. A set of demi-curtained windows ran along both sides of the corner building, and when he stood on his toes he could see an empty room with a floor of yellow wood. One wall was lined from end to end with mirrors; polished wooden practice barres ran along the others. A squat upright piano crouched in one corner, and beside it stood a table with an old-fashioned gramophone, its glossy black morning-glory horn catching the light. A diffuse haze of dust motes hovered in the midday silence. Some remnant of movement, of music, seemed revealed in that tourbillon of dust, as if ballet continued to exist in that room whether a class was being conducted there or not.

The building entrance was a green door set with a leaded glass window. Andras rang the bell and waited. Through the sheer panel that covered the window, he could see a stout woman descending a flight of stairs. She opened the door and put a hand on her hip, giving him an appraising look. She was red-faced, kerchiefed, with a deep smell of paprika about her, like the women who brought vegetables and goat’s milk to sell at the market in Debrecen.

“Madame Morgenstern?” he said, with hesitation; she didn’t look much like a ballet mistress.

“Hah! No,” she said in Hungarian. “Come in and close the door behind you. You’ll let in the cold.”

So he must have passed her inspection; he was glad, because the smells coming from inside were making him dizzy with hunger. He stepped into the entry, and the woman continued in a rapid stream of Hungarian as she took his coat and hat. What an enormous lot of flowers. She would see if there was a vase upstairs large enough to hold them. Lunch was nearly ready. She had prepared stuffed cabbage, and she hoped he liked it, because there was nothing else, except for spaetzle and a fruit compote and some sliced cold chicken and a walnut strudel. He should follow her upstairs. Her name was Mrs. Apfel. They climbed to the second floor, where she directed him to a front parlor decorated with worn Turkish rugs and dark furniture; she told him to wait there for Madame Morgenstern.

He sat on a gray velvet settee and took a long breath. Beneath the heady smell of stuffed cabbage there was the dry lemony tang of furniture polish and a faint scent of licorice. On a small carved table before him was a candy dish, a cut-glass nest filled with pink and lilac sugar eggs. He took an egg and ate it: anise. He straightened his tie and made sure the cotton backing wasn’t showing. After a moment he heard the click of heels in the hallway. A slim shadow moved across the wall, and a girl entered with a blue glass vase in her hands. The vase bristled with a wild profusion of flowers and branches and fake bluebirds, the daylilies beginning to darken at their edges, the roses hanging heavy on their stems. From behind this mass of fading blooms the girl looked at Andras, her dark hair brushed like a wing across her forehead.

“Thank you for the flowers,” she said in French.

As she set the vase on the sideboard, he saw she wasn’t a girl at all; her features had the sharper angles of an adult woman’s, and she held her back straight as if from decades of ballet training. But she was lithe and small, her hands like a child’s on the blue glass vase. Andras drank in a flood of embarrassment as he watched her arrange the bouquet. Why had he brought so many half-dead flowers? Why the bluebirds? Why all those branches? Why hadn’t he just bought something simple at the corner market? A dozen daisies? A sheaf of lupines? How much could it have cost? A couple of francs? The wood nymph smiled back at him over her shoulder, then came to shake his hand.

“Claire Morgenstern,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Mr. Lévi. Madame Gérard has had many kind things to say about you.”

He took her hand, trying not to stare; she looked decades younger than he’d imagined. He’d envisioned her as a woman of Madame Gérard’s age, but this woman couldn’t have been more than thirty. She had a quiet, astonishing beauty-fine bones, a mouth like a smooth pink-skinned fruit, large intelligent gray eyes. Claire Morgenstern: So this was the C. of the letter, not some elderly gentleman who had once been Mrs. Hász’s lover. Her large gray eyes were Mrs. Hász’s eyes, the quiet grief he saw there a mirror of the expression he’d seen in the older woman’s eyes. This Claire Morgenstern had to be Mrs. Hász’s daughter. A long moment passed before Andras could speak.

“The pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said in rushed and stilted French, knowing he’d gotten it wrong as soon as he said it. Belatedly he remembered to rise, and though he struggled for the right words, found himself continuing in the same vein. “Thank you for the invitation of me,” he stammered, and sat down again.

Madame Morgenstern took a seat beside him on a low chair. “Would you rather speak Hungarian?” she asked in Hungarian. “We can, if you like.”

He looked up at her as if from the bottom of a well. “French is fine,” he said, in Hungarian. And then in French, again, “French is fine.”

“All right, then,” she said. “You’ll have to tell me what Hungary is like these days. It’s been years since I was there, and Elisabet has never been.”

As if she’d been conjured by the mention of her name, a tall stern-looking girl entered the room, carrying a pitcher of iced tea. She was broad-shouldered like the swimmers Andras had admired at Palatinus Strand in Budapest; she gave him a look of impatient disdain as she filled his glass.

“This is my Elisabet,” said Madame Morgenstern. “Elisabet, this is Andras.”

Andras couldn’t make himself believe that this girl was Madame Morgenstern’s daughter. In Elisabet’s hands, the tea pitcher looked like a child’s toy. He drank his tea and looked from mother to daughter. Madame Morgenstern stirred her tea with a long spoon, while Elisabet, having set the pitcher on a table, threw herself into a wing chair and checked her wristwatch.

“If we don’t eat now I’ll be late for the movie,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet Marthe in an hour.”

“What movie?” Andras said, searching for a thread of conversation.

“You wouldn’t be interested,” Elisabet said. “It’s in French.”

“But I speak French,” Andras said.

Elisabet gave him a dry smile. “May-juh-pargl-Fronsay,” she said.

Madame Morgenstern closed her eyes. “Elisabet,” she said.

“What?”

“You know what.”

“I just want to go to the movies,” Elisabet said, and knocked her heels dully against the rug. Then she tilted her chin toward Andras and said, “Lovely tie.”

Andras looked down. His tie had flipped over as he’d leaned forward to take his glass of tea, and now the cotton backing faced the world, while the gold partridges flew unseen against his shirtfront. Hot with shame, he turned it around and stared into his tea.

“Lunch is served!” said the red-faced Mrs. Apfel from the doorway, pushing back her kerchief. “Come now, before the cabbage gets cold.”

…

There was a proper dining room, with polished wooden china cabinets and a white cloth on the table: echoes of the house on Benczúr utca, Andras thought. But there were no exsanguinated sandwiches here; the table was heavy with platters of stuffed cabbage and chicken and bowls of spaetzle, as though there were eight of them eating instead of three. Madame Morgenstern sat at the head of the table, Andras and Elisabet across from each other. Mrs. Apfel served the stuffed cabbage and spaetzle; Andras, grateful for the distraction, tucked his napkin into his collar and began to eat. Elisabet frowned at her plate. She pushed the cabbage aside and began eating the spaetzle, one tiny dumpling at a time.

“I hear you’re interested in mathematics,” Andras said, speaking to the top of Elisabet’s lowered head.

She raised her eyes. “Did my mother tell you that?”

“No, Madame Gérard did. She said you won a competition.”

“Anyone can do high-school mathematics.”

“Do you think you’ll want to study it in college?”

Elisabet shrugged. “If I go to college.”

“Darling, you can’t live on spaetzle,” Madame Morgenstern said quietly, looking at Elisabet’s plate. “You used to like stuffed cabbage.”

“It’s cruel to eat meat,” Elisabet said, and leveled her eyes at Andras. “I’ve seen how they butcher cows. They stick a knife in the neck and draw it downwards, like this, and the blood pours out. My biology class took a trip to a shochet. It’s barbaric.”

“Not really,” Andras said. “My brothers and I used to know the kosher butcher in our town. He was a friend of our father’s, and he was quite gentle with the animals.”

Elisabet watched him intently. “And can you explain to me how you gently butcher a cow?” she said. “What did he do? Pet them to death?”

“He used the traditional method,” Andras said, his tone sharper than he’d intended. “One quick cut across the neck. It couldn’t have hurt them for more than a second.”

Madame Morgenstern set her silverware down and put a napkin to her mouth as if she felt ill, and Elisabet’s expression became slyly triumphant. Mrs. Apfel stood in the doorway holding a water pitcher, waiting to see what would happen next.

“Go on,” Elisabet said. “What did he do then, after he made the cut?”

“I think we’re finished with this subject,” Andras said.

“No, please. I’d like to hear the rest, now that you’ve started.”

“Elisabet, that’s enough,” Madame Morgenstern said.

“But the conversation’s just getting interesting.”

“I said it’s enough.”

Elisabet crumpled her napkin and threw it onto the table. “I’m finished,” she said. “You can sit here with your guest and eat meat. I’m going to the cinema with Marthe.” She pushed her chair back and stood, nearly upsetting Mrs. Apfel and the water pitcher, then went off down the hall and knocked around in a distant room. A few moments later her heavy footsteps echoed on the stairs. The door of the dance studio slammed and its mullioned window jingled.

At the dining table, Madame Morgenstern lowered her forehead onto her palm. “I apologize, Monsieur Lévi,” she said.

“No, please,” he said. “It’s fine.” In fact, he wasn’t at all sorry to have been left alone with Madame Morgenstern. “Don’t be upset on my account,” he said. “That was a terrible topic of conversation. I apologize.”

“There’s no need,” Madame Morgenstern said. “Elisabet is impossible at times, that’s all. I can’t do anything with her once she’s decided she’s angry at me.”

“Why should she be angry at you?”

She gave a half smile and shrugged. “It’s complicated, I’m afraid. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl. I’m her mother. She doesn’t like me to have anything to do with her social affairs. And I mustn’t remind her that we’re Hungarian, either. She considers Hungarians an unenlightened people.”

“I’ve felt that way, too, at times,” Andras said. “I’ve spent a lot of time lately struggling to be French.”

“Your French is excellent, as it turns out.”

“No, it’s terrible. And I’m afraid I did nothing to dispel your daughter’s notion that Magyars are barbarians.”

Madame Morgenstern hid a smile behind her hand. “You were rather quick with that business about the butcher,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Andras said, but he’d started to laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about that over lunch.”

“So you really did know the butcher in your town,” she said.

“I did. And I saw him at his work. But Elisabet was right, I’m afraid-it was awful!”

“You must have grown up-where? Somewhere in the countryside?”

“Konyár,” he said. “Near Debrecen.”

“Konyár? That’s not twenty kilometers from Kaba, where my mother was born.” A shade passed over her features and was gone.

“Your mother,” he said. “But she doesn’t live there anymore?”

“No,” Madame Morgenstern said. “She lives in Budapest.” She fell silent for a moment, then turned the conversation back to Andras’s history. “So you’re a Hajdú, too. A flatlands boy.”

“That’s right,” he said. “My father owns a lumberyard in Konyár.” So she wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t discuss the subject of her family. He had been on the verge of mentioning the letter-of saying I’ve met your mother-but the moment had passed now, and there was a kind of relief in the prospect of talking about Konyár. Ever since he’d arrived in Paris and had mastered enough French to answer questions about his origins, he’d been telling people he was from Budapest. What would anyone have known of Konyár? And to those who would have known, like József Hász or Pierre Vago, Konyár meant a small and backward place, a town you were lucky to have escaped. Even the name sounded ridiculous-the punchline of a bawdy joke, the sound of a jumping jack springing from a box. But he really was from Konyár, from that dirt-floored house beside the railroad tracks.

“My father’s something of a celebrity in town, to tell the truth,” Andras said.

“Indeed! What is he known for?”

“His terrible luck,” Andras said. And then, feeling suddenly brave: “Shall I tell you his story, the way they tell it at home?”

“By all means,” she said, and folded her hands in anticipation.

So he told her the story just as he’d always heard it: Before his father had owned the lumberyard, he had suffered a string of misfortunes that had earned him the nickname of Lucky Béla. His own father had fallen ill while Béla was at rabbinical school in Prague, and had died as soon as he returned home. The vineyard he inherited had succumbed to blight. His first wife had died in childbirth, along with the baby, a girl; not long after, his house had burned to the ground. All three of his brothers were killed in the Great War, and his mother had given in to grief and drowned herself in the Tisza. At thirty he was a ruined man, penniless, his family dead. For a time he lived on the charity of the Jews of Konyár, sleeping in the Orthodox shul at night and eating what they left for him. Then, at the end of a drought summer, a famous Ukrainian miracle rabbi arrived from across the border and set up temporary quarters in the shul. He studied Torah with the local men, settled disputes, officiated at weddings, granted divorces, prayed for rain, danced in the courtyard with his disciples. One morning at dawn he came upon Andras’s father sleeping in the sanctuary. He’d heard the story of this unfortunate, this man whom all the village said must be suffering from a curse; they seemed to regard him with a kind of gratitude, as if he’d drawn the attention of the evil eye away from the rest of them. The rabbi roused Béla with a benediction, and Béla looked up in speechless fear. The rabbi was a gaunt man with an ice-white beard; his eyebrows stood out from the curve of his forehead like lifted wings, his eyes dark and liquid beneath them.

“Listen to me, Béla Lévi,” the rabbi whispered in the half-light of the sanctuary. “There’s nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best. You must fast for two days and go to the ritual bath, then accept the first offer of work you receive.”

Even if Lucky Béla had been a believer in miracles, his misfortunes would have made him a skeptic. “I’m too hungry to fast,” he said.

“Practice at hunger makes the fast easier,” the rabbi said.

“How do you know there’s not a curse on me?”

“I try not to wonder how I know. Certain things I just know.” And the rabbi made another blessing over Béla and left him alone in the sanctuary.

What more did Lucky Béla have to lose? He fasted for two days and bathed in the river at night. The next morning he wandered toward the railroad tracks, faint with hunger, and picked an apple from a stunted tree beside a white brick cottage. The proprietor of the lumberyard, an Orthodox Jew, stepped out of the cottage and asked Béla what he thought he was doing.

“I used to have a vineyard,” Béla said. “When I had a vineyard, I would have let you pick my grapes. When I had a house I would have welcomed you to my house. My wife would have given you something to eat. Now I have neither grapes nor house. I have no wife. I have no food. But I can work.”

“There’s no work for you here,” the man said, gently, “but come inside and eat.”

The man’s name was Zindel Kohn. His wife, Gitta, set bread and cheese before Lucky Béla. With Zindel and Gitta and their five small children, Lucky Béla ate; as he did, he allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past. He could not have imagined that this house would become his own house, that his own children would eat bread and cheese at this very table. But by the end of the afternoon he had a job: The boy who worked the mechanical saw at Zindel Kohn’s lumberyard had decided to become a disciple of the Ukrainian rabbi. He had left that morning without notice.

Six years later, when Zindel Kohn and his family moved to Debrecen, Lucky Béla took over the lumberyard. He married a black-haired girl named Flóra who bore him three sons, and by the time the oldest was ten, Béla had earned enough money to buy the lumberyard outright. He did a fine business; people in Konyár needed building materials and firewood in every season. Before long, hardly anyone in Konyár remembered that Lucky Béla’s nickname had been given in irony. The history might have been allowed to fade altogether had it not been for the return of the Ukrainian rabbi; this was at the height of the worldwide depression, just before the High Holidays. The rabbi spent an evening at Lucky Béla’s house and asked if he might tell his story in synagogue. It might help the Jews of Konyár, he said, to be reminded of what God would do for his children if they refused to capitulate to despair. Lucky Béla consented. The rabbi told the story, and the Jews of Konyár listened. Though Béla insisted his good fortune was due entirely to the generosity of others, people began to regard him as a kind of holy figure. They touched his house for good luck when they passed, and asked him to be godfather to their children. Everyone believed he had a connection to the divine.

“You must have thought so yourself as a child,” Madame Morgenstern said.

“I did! I thought he was invincible-even more so than most children think of their parents,” Andras said. “Sometimes I wish I’d never lost the illusion.”

“Ah, yes,” she said. “I understand.”

“My parents are getting older,” Andras said. “I hate to think of them alone in Konyár. My father had pneumonia last year, and couldn’t work for a month afterward.” He hadn’t spoken about this to anyone in Paris. “My younger brother’s at school a few hours away, but he’s caught up in his own life. And now my older brother’s leaving, going off to medical school in Italy.”

A shadow came to Madame Morgenstern’s features again, as if she’d experienced an inward twist of pain. “My mother’s getting older, too,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, a very long time.” She fell silent and glanced away from the table at the tall west-facing windows. The late autumn light fell in a diagonal plane across her face, illuminating the tapered curve of her mouth. “Forgive me,” she said, trying to smile; he offered his handkerchief, and she pressed it to her eyes.

He found himself fighting the impulse to touch her, to trace a line from her nape down the curve of her back. “Perhaps I’ve stayed too long,” he said.

“No, please,” she said. “You haven’t even had dessert.”

As if she’d been listening just beyond the dining-room door, Mrs. Apfel came in at that moment to serve the walnut strudel. Andras found that he had an appetite again. He was ravenous, in fact. He ate three slices of strudel and drank coffee with cream. As he did, he told Madame Morgenstern about his studies, about Professor Vago, about the trip to Boulogne-Billancourt. He found her easier to talk to than Madame Gérard. She had a way of pausing in quiet thought before she responded; she would pull her lips in pensively, and when she spoke, her voice was low and encouraging. After lunch they went back to the parlor and looked through her album of picture postcards. Her dancer friends had traveled as far as Chicago and Cairo. There was even a hand-colored postcard from Africa: three animals that looked like deer, but were slighter and more graceful, with straight upcurved horns and almond-shaped eyes. The French word for them was gazelle.

“Gazelle,” Andras said. “I’ll try to remember.”

“Yes, try,” she said, and smiled. “Next time I’ll test you.”

When the afternoon light had begun to wane, she rose and led Andras to the hallway, where his coat and hat hung on a polished stand. She gave him his things and returned his handkerchief. As she led him down the stairs she pointed out the photographs on the wall, images of students from years past: girls in ethereal clouds of tulle or sylphlike draperies of silk, young dancers under the transient spell of costumes and makeup and stage lights. Their expressions were serious, their arms as pale and nude as the branches of winter trees. He wanted to stay and look. He wondered if any of the photographs were of Madame Morgenstern herself when she was a child.

“Thank you for everything,” he said when they’d reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Please.” She put a slim hand on his arm. “I should thank you. You were very kind to stay.”

Andras flushed so deeply at the pressure of her hand that he could feel the blood beating in his temples. She opened the door and he stepped out into the chill of the afternoon. He found he couldn’t look at her to say goodbye. Next time I’ll test you. But she’d returned his handkerchief as though their paths were unlikely to cross again. He spoke his goodbye to the doorstep, to her feet in their fawn-colored shoes. Then he turned away and she closed the door behind him. Without thinking, he retraced his steps toward the river until he had reached the Pont Marie. There he paused at the edge of the bridge and brought out the handkerchief. It was still damp where she’d used it to dry her eyes. As if in a dream, he put a corner of it into his mouth and tasted the salt she’d left there.

CHAPTER EIGHT. Gare d’Orsay

THAT NIGHT HE found it impossible to sleep. He couldn’t stop reviewing every detail of his afternoon at the Morgensterns’. The shameful bouquet, and how doubly shameful it had looked when she’d carried it into the parlor in the blue glass vase. The moment when he’d realized that she must be the elder Mrs. Hász’s daughter, and how it had flustered him to discover it-how he’d said The pleasure to make your acquaintance and Thank you for the invitation of me. How she’d held her back straight as though she were always dancing, until the moment at the table after Elisabet had gone-the way her back had curved then, showing the linked pearls of her spine, and how he’d wanted to touch her. The way she’d listened as he’d told his father’s story. The close heat of her shoulder as she sat beside him on the sofa in the parlor, paging through the album of picture postcards. The moment at the door when she’d rested her hand on his arm. He tried to re-create an image of her in his mind-the dark sweep of hair across her brow, the gray eyes that seemed too large for her face, the clean line of her jaw, the mouth that drew in upon itself as she considered what he’d said-but he couldn’t make the disparate elements add up to an image of her. He saw her again as she turned to smile at him over her shoulder, girlish and wise at the same time. But what was he thinking, what could he be thinking? What an absurdity for him to think this way about a woman like Claire Morgenstern-he, Andras, a twenty-two-year-old student who lived in an unheated room and drank tea from a jam jar because he couldn’t afford coffee or a coffee cup. And yet she hadn’t sent him away, she’d kept talking to him, he’d made her laugh, she’d accepted his handkerchief, she’d touched his arm in a confiding and intimate manner.

For hours he rolled over and over in bed, trying to put her out of his mind. When the sky outside his window filled with a deep gray-blue light, he wanted to cry. All night he’d lain awake, and soon he would have to get up and go to class and then to work, where Madame Gérard would want to hear about the visit. It was Monday morning, the beginning of a new week. The night was over. The only thing he could do was to get out of bed and write the letter he had to write, the one he had to mail before he went to school that morning. He took an old piece of sketch paper and began a draft:

Dear Mme Morgenstern,

Thank you for the

For the what? For the very pleasant afternoon? How flat it would sound. How much that would make it seem like any ordinary afternoon. Whatever else it had been, it hadn’t been that. What was he supposed to write? He wanted to express his gratitude for Madame Morgenstern’s hospitality; that was certain. But underneath he wanted to send a coded message, to convey what he had felt and what he felt now-that a kind of electrical conduit had opened between them and ran between them still; that he’d taken her at her word when she’d suggested they might see each other again. He scratched out the lines he’d written and started again.

Dear Madame Morgenstern,

As absurd as it sounds, I’ve been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck.

And then what? What would he do, given the chance? For one brief delirious moment he thought of those old photographs that depicted the elaborate sexual positions, the silver images of entwined couples visible only when the cards were held at an angle to the light. He remembered standing in the changing room near the gymnastics hall with four other boys, each of them hunched over and holding a card, their gym shorts around their ankles, each in solitary agony as the silver couples flashed into and out of view. His card had shown a woman lying on a settee, her legs raised in a sharp V. She wore a Victorian-style gown that revealed her arms and shoulders and had fallen away from her legs entirely, leaving them bare as they strained toward the ceiling. A man bent over her, doing what even the Victorians did.

Flushed with shame and desire, he scratched out the lines again to begin another draft. He dipped his pen and wiped off the excess ink.

Dear Madame Morgenstern,

Thank you for your hospitality and for the pleasure of your company. My own accommodations are too poor to allow me to return your invitation, but if I may be of service to you in some other way, I hope you will not hesitate to call upon me. In the meantime I shall retain the hope that we will meet again.

Yours sincerely,

ANDRAS LÉVI

He read and reread the draft, wondering if he should try to write in French instead of Hungarian; finally he decided he was likely to make an imbecillic error in French. He wrote a fair copy on a sheet of thin white paper, which he folded in half and sealed into an envelope before he could begin to reexamine every line. Then he mailed the letter at the same blue box where he’d posted the letter from her mother.

That week he was grateful for the hard, painstaking work of model-building. In the studio he cut a rectangle of thick pasteboard to serve as a base for the model, and he traced the footprint of the building onto the base in a thin pencil line. On another piece of pasteboard he drew the shapes of the building’s four elevations, working meticulously from his measured drawing. His favorite tool was a ruler of near-transparent cellulose through which he could see the pencil lines that intersected the one he was drawing; that ruler, with its strict grid of millimeters, was an island of exactitude in the sea of tasks he had to complete, a strip of certainty in the midst of his uncertainty. Every piece of the model had to be made from sturdy material that could not be bought at a discount or substituted with flimsy stuff; everyone recalled what had happened during the first week of classes, when Polaner, trying to stretch his dwindling supply of francs, had used Bristol paper for a model, rather than pasteboard. In the middle of the critique, when Professor Vago had tapped the roof of Polaner’s model with his mechanical pencil, one wall had buckled and sent the paper chateau to its knees. Pasteboard was expensive; Andras could not afford to make a mistake, neither in the ink drawing nor the cutting. It provided some comfort to work alongside Rosen and Ben Yakov and Polaner, who were building the École Militaire, the Rotonde de la Villette, and the Théâtre de l’Odéon, respectively. Even smug Lemarque provided a welcome distraction; he’d decided to build a model of the twenty-sided Cirque d’Hiver, and could be heard periodically swearing as he traced wall after wall onto pasteboard.

In statics class there was the clear plain order of math: the three-variable equation to calculate the number and thickness of steel rods per cubic meter of concrete, the number of kilograms a support column could bear, the precise distribution of pressure along the crown of an arch. At the front of the classroom, chalking his way through a maze of calculations on the chip-edged blackboard, stood the wildly untidy Victor Le Bourgeois, professor of statics, a practicing architect and engineer, who, like Vago, was said to be a close friend of Pingusson’s. His disorder expressed itself in trousers torn at the knee, a jacket permanently grayed with chalk dust, a shaggy halo of ginger-colored hair, and a tendency to misplace the blackboard eraser. But when he began to trace the relationship between mathematical abstractions and tangible building materials, all the chaos of his person seemed to drop away. Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.

At the theater there was the relief of being able to speak her name aloud to Madame Gérard. During intermission at the Tuesday night performance, Andras brought Madame a cup of strong coffee and waited by the door of her dressing room as she drank it. She looked up from under the graceful arch of her brows; she was stately even in the soot-stained apron and head kerchief of the Mother. “I haven’t had word from Madame Morgenstern,” she said. “How was your luncheon?”

“Quite pleasance,” Andras said, and blushed. “Pleasant, I mean.”

“Quite pleasant, he says.”

“Yes,” Andras said. “Quite.” His French vocabulary seemed to have fled.

“Aha,” said Madame Gérard, as if she understood entirely. Andras’s blush deepened: He knew she must think that something had passed between himself and Elisabet. Something had, of course, though not at all what she must have imagined.

“Madame Morgenstern is very kind,” he said.

“And Mademoiselle?”

“Mademoiselle is very…” Andras swallowed and looked at the row of lights above Madame Gérard’s mirror. “Mademoiselle is very tall.”

Madame Gérard threw her head back and laughed. “Very tall!” she said. “Indeed. And very strong-willed. I knew her when she was a little girl playing at dolls; she used to speak to them so imperiously I thought they would burst into tears. But you mustn’t be scared of Elisabet. She’s harmless, I assure you.”

Before Andras could protest that he wasn’t in the least afraid of Elisabet, the double bell sounded to signal the impending end of intermission. Madame had a costume change to complete, and Andras had to leave to finish his tasks before the third act began. Once the actors went on again, time slowed to a polar trickle. All he could think of was the letter he’d written and when a response might come. His letter might have been delivered by that afternoon’s post, and she might have posted her own response today. Her letter could arrive as soon as tomorrow. It wasn’t unreasonable to think she might invite him for lunch again that weekend.

The next night, when the play finally ended and Andras had finished his duties for the evening, he ran all the way home to the rue des Écoles. In his mind he could see the envelope glowing in the dark of the entryway, the cream-colored stationery, Madame Morgenstern’s neat, even handwriting, the same handwriting in which she’d made the inscriptions beneath the postcards in her album. From Marie in Morocco. From Marcel in Rome. Who was Marcel, Andras wondered, and what had he written from Rome?

As he opened the tall red door with his skeleton key, he could already make out an envelope on the console table. He let the door swing behind him as he went for the letter. But it wasn’t the cream-colored lilac-scented envelope he’d hoped for; it was a wrinkled brown envelope addressed in the handwriting of his brother Mátyás. Unlike Tibor, Mátyás rarely wrote; when he did, the letters were thin and informational. This one was thick, requiring twice the usual amount of postage. His first thought was that something had happened to his parents-his father had been injured, his mother had caught influenza-and his second thought was of how ridiculous he’d been to expect a letter from Madame Morgenstern.

Upstairs he lit one of his precious candles and sat down at the table. He slit the brown envelope carefully with his penknife. Inside was a creased sheaf of pages, five of them, the longest letter Mátyás had ever written to him. The handwriting was large and careless and peppered with inkblots. Andras scanned the first lines for bad news about his parents, but there wasn’t any. If there had been, Andras thought, Tibor would have wired him. This letter was about Mátyás himself. Mátyás had learned that Andras had arranged for Tibor to enter medical school in January. Congratulations to them both, to Andras for having successfully exploited his lofty connections, and to Tibor for getting to leave Hungary at last. Now he, Mátyás, would certainly have to remain behind, alone, heir by default to a rural lumberyard. Did Andras think it was easy, having to hear their parents talk about how exciting Andras’s studies were, how well he was doing in his classes, how wonderful it was that Tibor could now study to become a doctor, what a fine couple of sons they were? Had Andras forgotten that Mátyás, too, might have hopes for his own studies abroad? Had Andras forgotten everything Mátyás had said on the subject? Did Andras think Mátyás was going to give up on his own plans? If he did, he’d better reconsider. Mátyás was saving money. If he saved enough before he graduated, he wouldn’t bother with his bac. He would run away to America, to New York, and go on the stage. He’d find a way to get by. In America all you needed was determination and the willingness to work. And once he left Hungary, it would be up to Andras and Tibor to worry about the lumberyard and their parents, because he, Mátyás, would never return.

At the end of the last page, written in a calmer hand-as if Mátyás had set the letter aside for a time, then come back to finish it once his anger had burned out-was a remorseful Hope you’re well. Andras gave a short, exhausted laugh. Hope you’re well! He might as well have written “Hope you die.”

Andras took up a sheet of paper from the desk. Dear Mátyás, he wrote. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been wretched a hundred times since I’ve been here. I’m wretched right now. Believe me when I tell you it hasn’t all been wonderful. As for you, I haven’t the slightest doubt that you will finish your bac and go to America, if that’s what you want (though I’d much rather you came here to Paris). I don’t expect you to take over for Apa, and neither does Apa himself. He wants you to finish your studies. But Mátyás was right to raise the question, right to be angry that there was no easy solution. He thought of Claire Morgenstern saying of her own mother, It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, a very long time. How her expression had clouded, how her eyes had filled with a grief that seemed to echo the grief he’d witnessed in her mother’s features. What had parted them, and what had kept Madame Morgenstern away? With effort he turned his thoughts back to his letter. I hope you won’t be angry with me for long, Mátyáska, but your anger does you credit: It’s evidence of what a good son you are. When I finish my studies I’ll go back to Hungary, and may God keep Anya and Apa in health long enough for me to be of service to them then. In the meantime he would worry about them just as his brothers did. In the meantime I expect you to be brilliant and fearless in all things, as ever! With love, your ANDRAS.

He posted the reply the next morning, hoping that the day would bring word from Madame Morgenstern. But there was no letter on the hall table that night when he returned from work. And why should he have expected her to write? he wondered. Their social exchange was complete. He had accepted Madame Morgenstern’s hospitality and had sent his thanks. If he’d imagined a connection with her, he had been mistaken. And in any case he was supposed to have made a connection with her daughter, not with Madame Morgenstern herself. That night he lay awake shivering and thinking of her and cursing himself for his ridiculous hope. In the morning he found a thin layer of ice in the washbasin; he broke it with the washcloth and splashed his face with a burning sheet of ice-cold water. Outside, a stiff wind blew loose shingles off the roof and shattered them in the street. At the bakery the woman gave him hot peasant loaves straight from the oven, charging him as if they were day-old bread. It was going to be one of the coldest winters ever, she told him. Andras knew he would need a warmer coat, a woolen scarf; his boots would need to be resoled. He didn’t have the money for any of it.

All week the temperature kept falling. At school the radiators emitted a feeble dry heat; the fifth-year students took places close to them, and the first-years froze by the windows. Andras spent hopeless hours on his model of the Gare d’Orsay, a train station already drifting into obsolescence. Though it still served as the terminus for the railways of southwestern France, its platforms were too short for the long trains used now. Last time he’d gone there to take measurements, the station had looked derelict and unkempt, a few of its high windows broken, a stippling of mildew darkening its line of arches. It didn’t cheer him to think he was preserving its memory in cardboard; his model was a flimsy homage to a tatterdemalion relic. On Friday he walked home alone, too dispirited to join the others at the Blue Dove-and there on the entry table was a white envelope with his name on it, the response he’d waited for all week. He tore it open in the foyer. Andras, you’re very welcome. Please visit us again sometime. Regards, C. MORGENSTERN. Nothing more. Nothing certain. Please visit us again sometime: What did that mean? He sat down on the stairs and dropped his forehead against his knees. All week he’d waited for this! Regards. His heart went on drumming in his chest, as if something wonderful were still about to happen. He tasted shame like a hot fragment of metal on his tongue.

After work that night he couldn’t bear the thought of going home to his tiny room, of lying down in the bed where he’d now spent five sleepless nights thinking about Claire Morgenstern. Instead he wandered toward the Marais, drawing his thin coat closer around him. It cheered him to take an unfamiliar path through the streets of the Right Bank; he liked losing his way and finding it again, discovering the strangely named alleyways and lanes-rue des Mauvais Garçons, rue des Guillemites, rue des Blancs-Manteaux. Tonight there was a smell of winter in the air, different from the Budapest smell of brown coal and approaching snow; the Paris smell was wetter and smokier and sweeter: chestnut leaves turning to mash in the gutters, the sugary brown scent of roasted nuts, the tang of gasoline from the boulevards. Everywhere there were posters advertising the ice-skating rinks, one in the Bois de Boulogne and another in the Bois de Vincennes. He hadn’t imagined that Paris would get cold enough for skating, but both sets of posters proclaimed that the ponds were frozen solid. One depicted a trio of spinning polar bears; the other showed a little girl in a short red skirt, her hands in a fur muff, one slender leg extended behind her.

In the rue des Rosiers a man and a woman stood beside one of these posters and kissed unabashedly, their hands buried inside each other’s coats. Andras was reminded of a game the children used to play in Konyár: Behind the baker’s shop there was a wall of white stone that was always warm because the baker’s oven was on the other side, and in the wintertime the boys would meet there after school to kiss the baker’s daughter. The baker’s daughter had pale brown freckles scattered across her nose like sesame seeds. For ten fillér she would press you up against the wall and kiss you until you couldn’t breathe. For five fillér you could watch her do it to someone else. She was saving for a pair of ice skates. Her name was Orsolya, but they never called her that; instead they called her Korcsolya, the word for ice skates. Andras had kissed her once, had felt her tongue explore his own as she held him up against the warm wall. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old; Orsolya must have been ten. Three of his friends from school were watching, cheering him on. Halfway through the kiss he’d opened his eyes. Orsolya, too, was open-eyed, but absent, her mind fixed elsewhere-perhaps on the ice skates. He’d never forgotten the day he came out of the house to see her skating on the pond, the silver flash at her soles like a teasing wink, a steely goodbye-forever to paid kissing. That winter she’d nearly died of cold, skating in all weather. “That girl will go through the ice,” Andras’s mother had predicted, watching Orsolya tracing loops in an early March rain. But she hadn’t gone through the ice. She’d survived her winter on the millpond, and the next winter she was there again, and the one after that she’d gone away to secondary school. He could see her now, a red-skirted figure through a gray haze, untouchable and alone.

Now he made his way though the grotto of medieval streets toward the rue de Sévigné, toward Madame Morgenstern’s building. He hadn’t decided to come here, but here he was; he stood on the sidewalk opposite and rocked on his heels. It was near midnight, and all the lights were out upstairs. But he crossed the street and looked over the demi-curtains into the darkened studio. There was the morning-glory horn of the phonograph, gleaming black and brutal in a corner; there was the piano with its flat toothy grimace. He shivered inside his coat and imagined the pink-clad forms of girls moving across the yellow plane of the studio floor. It was bitterly, blindingly cold. What was he doing out here on the street at midnight? There was only one explanation for his behavior: He’d gone mad. The pressure of his life here, of his single chance at making a man and an artist of himself, had proved too much for him. He put his head against the wall of the entryway, trying to slow his breathing; after a moment, he told himself, he would shake off this madness and find his way home. But then he raised his eyes and saw what he hadn’t known he’d been looking for: There in the entryway was a slim glass-fronted case of the kind used to post menus outside restaurants; instead of a menu, this one held a white rectangle of cardstock inscribed with the legend Horaire des Classes.

The schedule, the pattern of her life. There it was, printed in her own neat hand. Her mornings were devoted to private lessons, the early afternoons to beginning classes, the later afternoons to intermediate and advanced. Wednesdays and Fridays she took the mornings off. On Sundays, the afternoons. Now, at least, he knew when he might look through this window and see her. Tomorrow wasn’t soon enough, but it would have to be.

All the next day he tried to turn his thoughts away from her. He went to the studio, where everyone gathered on Saturdays to work; he built his model, joked with Rosen, heard about Ben Yakov’s continuing fascination with the beautiful Lucia, shared his peasant bread with Polaner. By noon he couldn’t wait any longer. He went down into the Métro at Raspail and rode to Châtelet. From there he ran all the way to the rue de Sévigné; by the time he arrived he was hot and panting in the winter chill. He looked over the demi-curtains of the studio. A crowd of little girls in dancing clothes were packing their ballet shoes into canvas satchels, holding their street shoes in their hands as they lined up at the door. The covered entrance to the studio was crowded with mothers and governesses, the mothers in furs, the governesses in woolen coats. A few little girls broke through the cluster of women and ran off toward a candy shop. He waited for the crowd at the door to clear, and then he saw her just inside the entryway: Madame Morgenstern, in a black practice skirt and a close-wrapped gray sweater, her hair gathered at the nape of her neck in a loose knot. When all the children but one had been collected, Madame Morgenstern emerged from the entryway holding the last girl’s hand. She stepped lightly on the sidewalk in her dancing shoes, as if she didn’t want to ruin their soles on the paving stones. Andras had a sudden urge to flee.

But the little girl had seen him. She dropped Madame Morgenstern’s hand and took a few running steps toward him, squinting as if she couldn’t quite make him out. When she was close enough to touch his sleeve, she stopped short and turned back. Her shoulders rose and fell beneath the blue wool of her coat.

“It’s not Papa after all,” she said.

Madame Morgenstern raised her eyes in apology to the man who wasn’t Papa. When she saw it was Andras, she smiled and tugged the edge of her wrapped sweater straight, a gesture so girlish and self-conscious that it brought a rush of heat to Andras’s chest. He crossed the few squares of pavement between them. He didn’t dare to press her hand in greeting, could hardly look into her eyes. Instead he stared at the sidewalk and buried his hands in his pockets, where he discovered a ten-centime coin left over from his purchase of bread that morning. “Look what I found,” he said, kneeling to give the coin to the little girl.

She took it and turned it over in her fingers. “You found this?” she said. “Maybe someone dropped it.”

“I found it in my pocket,” he said. “It’s for you. When you go to the shops with your mother, you can buy candy or a new hair ribbon.”

The girl sighed and tucked the coin into the side pocket of her satchel. “A hair ribbon,” she said. “I’m not allowed candy. It’s bad for the teeth.”

Madame Morgenstern put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and drew her toward the door. “We can wait by the stove inside,” she said. “It’s warmer there.” She turned back to catch Andras’s eye, meaning to include him in the invitation. He followed her inside, toward the compact iron stove that stood in a corner of the studio. A fire hissed behind its isinglass window, and the little girl knelt to look at the flames.

“This is a surprise,” Madame Morgenstern said, lifting her gray eyes to his own.

“I was out for a ramble,” Andras said, too quickly. “Studying the quartier.”

“Monsieur Lévi is a student of architecture,” Madame Morgenstern told the girl. “Someday he’ll design grand buildings.”

“My father’s a doctor,” the girl said absently, not looking at either of them.

Andras stood beside Madame Morgenstern and warmed his hands at the stove, his fingers inches from her own. He looked at her fingernails, the slim taper of her digits, the lines of the birdlike bones beneath the skin. She caught him looking, and he turned his face away. They warmed their hands in silence as they waited for the girl’s father, who materialized a few minutes later: a short mustachioed man with a monocle, carrying a doctor’s bag.

“Sophie, where are your glasses?” he asked, pulling his mouth into a frown.

The little girl fished a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles from her satchel.

“Please, Madame,” he said. “If you can, be sure she wears them.”

“I’ll try,” Madame Morgenstern said, and smiled.

“They fall off when I dance,” the girl protested.

“Say goodbye, Sophie,” the doctor said. “We’ll be late for dinner.”

In the doorway, Sophie turned and waved. Then she and her father were gone, and Andras stood alone in the studio with Madame Morgenstern. She stepped away from the stove to gather a few things the children had left behind: a stray glove, a hairpin, a red scarf. She put all the things into a basket which she set beside the piano. Objets trouvés.

“I wanted to thank you again,” Andras said, when the silence between them had stretched to an intolerable length. It came out more gruffly than he’d intended, and in Hungarian, a low rural growl. He cleared his throat and repeated it in French.

“Please, Andras,” she said in Hungarian, laughing. “You wrote such a lovely note. And there was no need to thank me in the first place. I’m certain it wasn’t the most pleasant afternoon for you.”

He couldn’t tell her what the afternoon had been like for him, or what the past week had been like. He saw again in his mind the way she’d smiled and tugged at her sweater when she’d recognized him, that involuntary and self-conscious act. He crushed his cap in his hands, looking at the polished studio floor. There were heavy footsteps on the floor above, Elisabet’s, or Mrs. Apfel’s.

“Have we put you off for good?” Madame Morgenstern asked. “Can you come again tomorrow? Elisabet will have a friend here for lunch, and maybe we’ll go skating in the Bois de Vincennes afterward.”

“I don’t have skates,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“Neither do we,” she said. “We always rent them. It’s lovely. You’ll enjoy it.”

It’s lovely, you’ll enjoy it, as if it were really going to happen. And then he said yes, and it was.

CHAPTER NINE. Bois de Vincennes

THIS TIME, when he went to lunch on the rue de Sévigné, he didn’t wear a costume tie and he didn’t bring a bushel of wilting flowers; instead he wore an old favorite shirt and brought a bottle of wine and a pear tart from the bakery next door. As before, Mrs. Apfel laid out a feast: a layered egg-and-potato rakott krumpli, a tureen of carrot soup, a hash of red cabbage and apples with caraway, a dark peasant loaf, and three kinds of cheese. Madame Morgenstern was in a quiet mood; she seemed grateful for the presence of Elisabet’s friend, a stout heavy-browed girl in a brown woolen dress. This was the Marthe with whom Elisabet had gone to the movies the week before. She kept Elisabet talking about goings-on at school: who had made a fool of herself in geography class and who had won a choir solo and who was going to Switzerland to ski during the winter holidays. Every now and then Elisabet threw a glance at Andras, as if she wanted him to take note of the fact that the conversation excluded him. Outside, a light snow had begun to fall. Andras couldn’t wait to get out of the house. It was a relief when the pear tart was cut and eaten, when they could put their coats on and go.

At half past two they rode the Métro to the Bois. When they emerged from the station, Elisabet and Marthe hurried ahead, arm in arm, while Madame Morgenstern walked with Andras. She spoke about her students, about the upcoming winter pageant, about the recent cold snap. She was wearing a close-fitting red woolen hat shaped like a bell; the loose ends of her hair curled from its edge, and snowflakes gathered on its crown.

Inside the snowy Bois, between the barren elms and oaks and frosted evergreens, the paths were full of men and women carrying skates. From the lake came the shouts and calls of skaters, the scrape of blades on ice. They came to a break in the trees, and before them lay the frozen lake with its small central islands, its fenced banks crowded with Parisians. On the ice, serious-looking men and women in winter coats moved in a slow sweep around the islands. A warming house with a scalloped glass entryway stood on a shallow rise. According to a sign lettered in red, skates could be rented there for three francs. Elisabet and Marthe led their little group into the warming house and they waited in line at the rental counter. Andras insisted on renting skates for all of them; he tried not to think about what those twelve vanished francs would mean to him in the coming week. On a damp green bench they exchanged their shoes for skates, and soon afterward they were staggering downhill on a rubber path toward the lake.

Andras stepped onto the ice and cut a chain of arcs toward the larger of the two islands, testing the edge and balance of the blades. Tibor had taught him to skate when he was five years old; they had skated every day on the millpond in Konyár, on blades their father had made from scrapwood edged with heavy-gauge wire. As schoolboys in Debrecen they had skated at an outdoor rink on Piac utca, a perfect manmade oval artificially cooled by underground pipes and groomed to a glassine smoothness. Andras was light and nimble on skates, faster than his brothers or his friends. Even now, on these dull rental blades, he felt agile and swift. He cut between the skaters in their dark woolen coats, his jacket fluttering behind him, his cap threatening to fly from his head. If he had paused to notice, he might have seen young men watching him with envy as he sped by; he might have seen the girls’ curious glances, the elderly skaters’ looks of disapproval. But he was aware only of the pure thrill of flying across the ice, the quick exchange of heat between his blades and the frozen lake. He made a circuit around the larger island, coming up behind the women at top speed, then slipped between Madame Morgenstern and Elisabet so neatly that they both stopped and gasped.

“Do you mind watching where you’re going?” Elisabet said in her curt French. “You could hurt someone.” She took Marthe’s arm and the two of them pushed past him. And Andras was left to skate with Madame Morgenstern through a drifting tulle of snow.

“You’re quick on your feet,” she said, and gave him a fleeting smile from beneath the bell of her hat.

“Maybe on the ice,” Andras said, blushing. “I was never very good at sports.”

“You look as if you knew something about dancing, though.”

“Only that I’m not very good at that, either.”

She laughed and skated ahead of him. In the gray afternoon light, the lake brought to mind the Japanese paintings Andras had seen at the International Exposition; the evergreens spread their dark feathers against a wash of sky, and the hills were like doves huddled together for warmth. Madame Morgenstern moved easily on the ice, her back held straight, her arms rounded, as though this were just another form of ballet. She never stumbled against Andras or leaned on him as they circled the lake; even when she hit a sprig of evergreen and lost her balance, she skipped onto the other blade without a glance at him. But as they cleared the far end of the smaller island a second time, she drifted to his side.

“My brother and I used to skate in Budapest,” she said. “We used to go to the Városliget, not far from our house. You know the beautiful lake there, by the Vajdahunyad Castle?”

“Oh, yes.” He’d never been able to afford the entry fee while he’d lived in Budapest, but he and Tibor had gone many times to watch the skaters at night. The castle, an amalgam of a thousand years of architectural styles, had been built for a millennial celebration forty years earlier. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements melted into one another along the length of the building; to walk along that strange façade was to pass through centuries. The castle was lit from below, and there was always music. Now he imagined two children, Madame Morgenstern and her brother-József Hász’s father?-casting their own dark shadows across the lighter shadow of the castle.

“Was your brother a good skater?” he asked.

Madame Morgenstern laughed and shook her head. “Neither of us was very good, but we had a good time. Sometimes I would invite my friends to come along. We would link hands and my brother would lead us along like a string of wooden ducks. He was ten years older, and far more patient than I would have been.” She pressed her lips together as she skated on, tucking her hands into her sleeves. Andras kept close beside her, catching glimpses of her profile beneath the low brim of her hat.

“I can teach you a waltz, if you’d like,” he said.

“Oh, no. I can’t do anything fancy.”

“It’s not fancy,” he said, and skated ahead to show her the steps. It was a simple waltz he’d learned in Debrecen as a ten-year-old: three strokes forward, a long arc, and a turn; three strokes backward, another arc, another turn. She repeated the steps, following him as he traced them on the ice. Then he turned to face her. Drawing a breath, he put a hand at her waist. Her arm came around him and her gloved hand found his hand. He hummed a few bars of “Brin de Muguet” and led her into the steps. She hesitated at first, particularly at the turns, but soon she was moving as lightly as he might have imagined, her hand firm against his hand. He knew that Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov would have laughed to see him dancing like this in front of everyone, but he didn’t care. For a few moments, the length of the song in his head, this light-footed woman in her bell-shaped hat was pressed close against him, her hand closed inside his hand. His mouth brushed the brim of her hat, and he tasted a cold damp veil of snowflakes. He could feel her breath against his neck. She glanced up at him and their eyes caught for an instant before he looked away. He reminded himself that anything he felt for her was hopeless; she was an adult woman with a complicated life, a profession, a daughter in high school. The waltz ended and went silent in his head. He let his arms fall from her body, and she moved away to skate at his side. They skated twice around the island before she spoke again.

“You make me homesick for Hungary,” she said. “It’s more than sixteen years since I was there. Elisabet’s lifetime.” She scanned the ice, and Andras followed her gaze. They could see the green and brown of Elisabet’s and Marthe’s coats far ahead. Elisabet pointed to something on the shore, the black shape of a dog leaping after a smaller, fleeter shape.

“Sometimes I think I might go back,” Madame Morgenstern said in a half whisper. “More often, though, I think I never will.”

“You will,” Andras said, surprised to find his voice steady. He took her arm, and she didn’t pull away. Instead she removed a hand from her coat sleeve and let it rest upon his arm. He shivered, though he could no longer feel the cold. They skated that way in silence for the time it took to circle the islet once more. But then a voice reached them from across the ice, resonant and familiar: It was Madame Gérard, calling his name and Madame Morgenstern’s. Andráska. Klárika. The Hungarian diminutives, as though they were all still in Budapest. Madame Gérard came gliding toward them in a new fur-collared coat and hat, followed by three other actors from the theater. She and Madame Morgenstern embraced, laughed, remarked on the beauty of the snow and the number of people on the frozen lake.

“Klárika, my dear, I’m very glad to see you. And here’s Andráska. And that must be Elisabet up ahead.” She smiled slyly and gave Andras a wink, then called Elisabet and Marthe back to the group. When they complained of the cold, she invited everyone for hot chocolate at the café. They sat together at a long wooden table and drank chocolate from crockery mugs, and it was easy for Andras to let everyone else talk, to let their conversation join the conversations of other skaters in the crowded warming house. The rising feeling he’d had just before Madame Gérard had arrived had already begun to dissipate; Madame Morgenstern seemed once again impossibly far away.

When they were finished with the chocolate, he retrieved their shoes from the rental desk, and afterward they walked together along the path toward the edge of the Bois. He kept looking for his chance to take Madame Morgenstern’s elbow, to let the others go on ahead while the two of them walked behind. Instead it was Marthe who dropped back to walk with Andras. She was purposeful and grim in the deepening cold.

“It’s hopeless, you know,” she said. “She wants nothing to do with you.”

“Who?” Andras said, alarmed to think he’d been so transparent.

“Elisabet! She wants you to stop looking at her all the time. Do you think she likes being looked at by a pathetic Hungarian?”

Andras sighed and glanced up ahead to where Elisabet was now walking with Madame Gérard, her green coat swinging around her legs. She stooped to say something to Madame, who threw her head back and laughed.

“She’s not interested in you,” Marthe said. “She’s already got a boyfriend. So there’s no need to come to the house again. And you don’t have to waste your time trying to charm her mother.”

Andras cleared his throat. “All right,” he said. “Well, thank you for telling me.”

Marthe gave a businesslike nod. “It’s my duty as Elisabet’s friend.”

And then they had reached the edge of the park, and Madame Morgenstern was beside him again, her sleeve brushing his own. They stood at the entrance to the Métro, the rush of trains echoing below. “Won’t you come with us?” she said.

“No, come with us!” Madame Gérard said. “We’re taking a cab. We’ll drop you at home.”

It was cold and growing dark, but Andras couldn’t bear the thought of a ride on the crowded Métro with Elisabet and Marthe and Madame Morgenstern. Nor did he want to crowd into a cab with Madame Gérard and the others. He wanted to be alone, to find his way back to his own neighborhood, to lock himself into his room.

“I think I’ll walk,” he told them.

“But you’ll come again for lunch next Sunday,” Madame Morgenstern said, looking up at him from under the brim of her hat, her skin still illuminated with the rush of skating. “In fact, we’re hoping you’ll make a habit of it.”

How else could he have replied? “Yes, yes, I’ll come,” he said.

CHAPTER TEN. Rue de Sévigné

AND SO ANDRAS became a fixture at Sunday lunches on the rue de Sévigné. Quickly they established a pattern: Andras would come and exchange pleasantries with Madame Morgenstern; Elisabet would sit and scowl at Andras, or make fun of his clothes or his accent; when she failed to whip him up as she’d done at the first lunch, she’d grow bored and go out with Marthe, who had cultivated her own towering scorn for Andras. Once Elisabet had gone he would sit with Madame Morgenstern and listen to records on the phonograph, or look at art magazines and picture postcards, or read from a book of poetry to practice his French, or talk about his family, his childhood. At times he tried to bring up the subject of her own past-the brother whom she hadn’t seen in years, the shadowy events that had resulted in Elisabet’s birth and had brought Madame Morgenstern to Paris. But she always managed to evade that line of conversation, turning his careful questions aside like the hands of unwelcome dance partners. And if he blushed when she sat close beside him, or stammered as he tried to respond after she’d paid him a compliment, she gave no sign that she’d noticed.

Before long he knew the precise shape of her fingernails, the cut and fabric of every one of her winter dresses, the pattern of lace at the edges of her pocket handkerchiefs. He knew that she liked pepper on her eggs, that she couldn’t tolerate milk, that the heel of the bread was her favorite part. He knew she’d been to Brussels and to Florence (though not with whom); he knew that the bones of her right foot ached when the weather was wet. Her moods were changeable, but she tempered the darker ones by making jokes at her own expense, and playing silly American tunes on the phonograph, and showing Andras droll photos of her youngest students in their dance exhibition costumes. He knew that her favorite ballet was Apollo, and that her least favorite was La Sylphide, because it was over-danced and so rarely done with originality. He considered himself shamefully ignorant on the subject of dance, but Madame Morgenstern seemed not to care; she would play ballets on the phonograph and describe what would be happening onstage as the music crested and ebbed, and sometimes she rolled up the sitting-room rug and reproduced the choreography for him in miniature, her skin flushing with pleasure as she danced. In return he would take her on walks around the Marais, narrating the architectural history of the buildings among which she made her life: the sixteenth-century Hôtel Carnavalet, with its bas-reliefs of the Four Seasons; the Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil, whose great medusa-headed carriage doors had once opened regularly for Beaumarchais; the Guimard Synagogue on the rue Pavée, with its undulating façade like an open Torah scroll. She wondered aloud how she’d never taken note of those things before. He had pulled away a veil for her, she said, revealed a dimension of her quartier that she would never have discovered otherwise.

Despite the reassurance of the standing invitation, he lived in the fear that one Sunday he’d arrive at Madame Morgenstern’s to find another man at the table, some mustachioed captain or tweed-vested doctor or talented Muscovite choreographer-some cultivated forty-year-old with a cultural fluency that Andras could never match, and a knowledge of the things that gentlemen were supposed to know: wines, music, ways to make a woman laugh. But the terrifying rival never appeared, at least not on Sunday afternoons; that fraction of the Morgenstern week seemed to belong to Andras alone.

Outside the household on the rue de Sévigné, life went on as usual-or what had come to seem usual, within the context of his life as a student of architecture in Paris. His model progressed toward completion, its walls already cut from the stiff white pasteboard and ready for assembly. Despite the fact that it was now as large as an overcoat box, he’d begun carrying the model to and from school each day. This was due to a recent spate of vandalism, directed only, it seemed, at the Jewish students of the École Spéciale. A third-year student named Jean Isenberg had had a set of elaborate blueprints flooded with ink; a fourth-year, Anne-Laure Bauer, had been robbed of her expensive statics textbooks the week before an exam. Andras and his friends had so far escaped unscathed, but Rosen believed it was only a matter of time before one of them became a target. The professors called a general assembly and spoke sternly to the students, promising severe consequences for the perpetrators and imploring anyone with evidence to come forth, but no one volunteered any information. At the Blue Dove, Rosen advanced his own theory. Several students were known to belong to the Front de la Jeunesse and a group called Le Grand Occident, whose professed nationalism was a thin cover for anti-Semitism.

“That weasel Lemarque is a Jeunesse stooge,” Rosen said over his almond biscuits and coffee. “I’d bet he’s behind this.”

“It can’t be Lemarque,” Polaner said.

“Why not?”

Polaner flushed slightly, folding his slim white hands in his lap. “He helped me with a project.”

“He did, did he?” Rosen said. “Well, I think you’d better watch your back. That little salopard would just as soon slit your throat as bid you bonjour.”

“You won’t make friends by setting yourself against everyone,” said the politic Ben Yakov, whose chief preoccupation seemed to be to get as many people as possible to admire him, both male and female.

“Who cares?” said Rosen. “This isn’t a tea party we’re talking about.”

Andras quietly agreed with Rosen. He’d had his misgivings about Lemarque ever since the ambiguous incident with Polaner at the beginning of the year. He’d watched Lemarque after that, and had found it impossible to ignore the way Lemarque looked at Polaner, as if there were something compelling and repellent about him at once, or as if his disgust with Polaner gave him a kind of pleasure. Lemarque had a way of sidling up to Polaner, of finding excuses to talk to him in class: Could he borrow Polaner’s pantograph? Could he see Polaner’s solution to this difficult statics problem? Was this Polaner’s scarf that he’d found in the courtyard? Polaner seemed unwilling to consider that Lemarque could have anything but friendly motives. But Andras didn’t trust Lemarque, nor the slit-eyed students who sat with him at the student cantina, smoking a German brand of cigarettes and wearing buttoned-up shirts and surplus military jackets, as if they wanted to be ready to fight if called upon. Unlike the other students, they kept their hair clipped close and their boots polished. Andras had heard some people refer to them disparagingly as la garde. And then there were the ones who wore subtler signs of their politics: the ones who seemed to look directly through Andras and Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov, though they passed each other in the halls or in the courtyard every day.

“What we need to do is infiltrate those groups,” Rosen said. “The Front de la Jeunesse. The Grand Occident. Go to their meetings, learn what they’re planning.”

“That’s brilliant,” Ben Yakov said. “They’ll find us out and break our necks.”

“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 manifestation 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.

Madame Morgenstern lowered her forehead into her hand. “How much longer will she be like this, do you think? You weren’t like this when you were sixteen, were you?”

“Worse,” Andras said, and smiled. “But I didn’t live at home, so my mother was spared.”

“I’ve threatened to send her to boarding school, but she knows I don’t have the heart. Nor the money, for that matter.”

“Well,” he said. “Chamonix. How long will she be there?”

“Ten days,” she said. “The longest she’s been gone from home.”

“Then I suppose it’ll be January before I see you again,” Andras said. He heard himself say it aloud-maga, the singular Hungarian you-but by that time it was too late, and in any case Madame Morgenstern hadn’t seemed to notice the slip. With the excuse that it was time for him to go to work, he got up to take his coat and hat from the rack at the top of the stairs. But she stopped him with a hand on his sleeve.

“You’re forgetting the Spectacle d’Hiver,” she said. “You’ll come, won’t you?”

Her students’ winter recital. He knew it was next week, of course. It was to take place at the Sarah-Bernhardt on Thursday evening; he was the one who had designed the posters. But he hadn’t expected to have any excuse to attend. He wasn’t scheduled to work that night, since The Mother would already have closed for the holidays. Now Madame Morgenstern was looking at him in quiet anticipation, her hand burning through the fabric of his coat. His mouth was a desert, his hands glacial with sweat. He told himself that the invitation meant nothing, that it fell perfectly within the bounds of their acquaintance: as a friend of the family, as a possible suitor of Elisabet, he might well be asked to come. He mustered a response in the affirmative, saying he’d be honored, and they executed their weekly parting ritual: the coat-rack, his things, the stairs, a chaste goodbye. But at the threshold she held his gaze a moment longer than usual. Her eyebrows came together, and she held her mouth in its pensive pose. Just as she seemed about to speak, a pair of red-jacketed schoolgirls ran down the sidewalk chasing a little white dog, and they had to move apart, and the moment passed. She raised a hand in farewell and stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

CHAPTER ELEVEN. Winter Holiday

THAT YEAR, in her studio on the rue de Sévigné, Claire Morgenstern had taught some ninety-five girls between the ages of eight and fourteen, three of the oldest of whom would soon depart for professional training with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. She had been preparing the children for the Spectacle d’Hiver for two months now; the costumes were ready, the young dancers schooled in the ways of snowflakes, sugarplums, and swans, the winter-garden scenery in readiness. That week Andras’s advertising poster appeared all over town: a snowflake child in silhouette against a starry winter sky, one leg extended in an arabesque, the words Spectacle d’Hiver trailing the upraised right hand like a comet tail. Every time he saw it-on the way to school, on the wall opposite the Blue Dove, at the bakery-he heard Madame Morgenstern saying You’ll come, won’t you?

By Wednesday, the evening of the dress rehearsal, he felt he couldn’t wait another day to see her. He arrived at the Sarah-Bernhardt at his usual hour, carrying a large plum cake for the coffee table. The corridors backstage were thronged with girls in white and silver tulle; they surged around him, blizzardlike, as he slipped into the backstage corner where the coffee table was arranged. With his pocketknife he cut the plum cake into a raft of little pieces. A group of girls in snowflake costumes clustered at the edges of the curtain, waiting for their entrance. As they tiptoed in place, they cast interested glances at the coffee table and the cake. Andras could hear a stage manager calling for the next group of dancers. Madame Morgenstern-Klara, as Madame Gérard called her-was nowhere to be seen.

He watched from the wings as the little girls danced their snowflake dance. The girl whose father had come late was among that group of children; when she ran back into the wings after her dance, she called to Andras and showed him that she had a new pair of glasses, this one with flexible wire arms that curled around the backs of her ears. They wouldn’t fall off while she danced, she explained. As she kicked into a pirouette to demonstrate, he heard Madame Morgenstern’s laugh behind him.

“Ah,” she said. “The new glasses.”

Andras allowed himself a swift look at her. She was dressed in practice clothes, her dark hair twisted close against her head. “Ingenious,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “They don’t come off at all.”

“They come off when I want them to,” the girl said. “I take them off at night.”

“Of course,” Andras said. “I didn’t mean to suggest you wore them always.”

The girl rolled her eyes at Madame Morgenstern and raced to the coffee table, where the other snowflakes were devouring the plum cake.

“This is a surprise,” Madame Morgenstern said. “I didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow.”

“I have a job here, in case you’ve forgotten,” Andras said, and crossed his arms. “I’m responsible for the comfort and happiness of the performers.”

“That cake is your doing, I suppose?”

“The girls don’t seem to object.”

“I object. I don’t allow sweets backstage.” But she gave him a wink, and went to the table to take a piece of plum cake herself. The cake was dense and golden, its top studded with halved mirabelles. “Oh,” she said. “This is good. You shouldn’t have. Take some for yourself, at least.”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be professional.”

Madame Morgenstern laughed. “You’ve caught me at a rather busy time, I’m afraid. I’ve got to get the next group of girls onstage.” She brushed a snow of gold crumbs from her hands, and he found himself imagining the taste of plum on her fingers.

“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” he said. He was ready to say I’ll be off now, ready to leave her to the rehearsal, but then he thought of his empty room, and the long hours that lay between that night and the next, and the blank expanse of time that stretched into the future beyond Thursday-time when he’d have no excuse to see her. He raised his eyes to hers. “Have a drink with me tonight,” he said.

She gave a little jolt. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

“Please, Klara,” he said. “I can’t bear it if you say no.”

She rubbed the tops of her arms as if she’d gotten a chill. “Andras-”

He mentioned a café, named a time. And before she could say no again, he turned and went down the backstage hallway and out into the white December evening.

…

The Café Bédouin was a dark place, its leather upholstery cracked, its blue velvet draperies lavendered with age. Behind the bar stood rows of dusty cut-glass bottles, relics of an earlier age of drinking. Andras arrived there an hour before the time he’d mentioned, already sick with impatience, disbelieving what he’d done. Had he really asked her to have a drink with him? Called her by her first name, in its intimate-seeming Hungarian form? Spoken to her as though his feelings might be acceptable, might even be returned? What did he expect would happen now? If she came, it would only be to confirm that he’d acted inappropriately, and perhaps to tell him she could no longer admit him to her house on Sunday afternoons. At the same time he was certain she’d known his feelings for weeks now, must have known since the day they’d gone skating in the Bois de Vincennes. It was time for them to be honest with each other; perhaps it was time for him to confess that he’d carried her mother’s letter from Hungary. He stared at the door as if to will it off its hinges. Each time a woman entered he leapt from his chair. He shook his father’s pocket watch to make sure nothing was loose, wound it again to make sure it was keeping time. Half an hour passed, then another. She was late. He looked into his empty whiskey glass and wondered how long he could sit in this bar without having to order a second drink. The waiters drifted by, throwing solicitous glances in his direction. He ordered another whiskey and drank it, hunched over his glass. He had never felt more desperate or more absurd. Then, finally, the door opened again and she was before him in her red hat and her close-fitting gray coat, out of breath, as if she’d run all the way from the theater. He leapt from his chair.

“I was afraid I’d miss you,” she said, and gave a sigh of relief. She took off her hat and slid onto the banquette across from him. She wore a snug gabardine jacket, closed at the collar with a neat silver pin in the shape of a harp.

“You’re late,” Andras said, feeling the whiskey in his head like a swarm of bees.

“The rehearsal finished ten minutes ago! You ran out before I could tell you what time I could come.”

“I was afraid you’d say you wouldn’t see me at all.”

“You’re quite right. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Why did you come, then?” He reached across the table for her hand. Her fingers were freezing cold, but she wouldn’t let him warm them. She slid her hand away, blushing into the collar of her jacket.

The waiter arrived to ask for their orders, hopeful that the young man would spend more money now that his friend had arrived. “I’ve been drinking whiskey,” he said. “Have a whiskey with me. It’s the drink of American movie stars.”

“I’m not in the mood,” she said. Instead she ordered a Brunelle and a glass of water. “I can’t stay,” she said, once the waiter had gone. “One drink, and then I’ll go.”

“I have something to tell you,” Andras said. “That’s why I wanted you to come.”

“What is it?” she said.

“In Budapest, before I left, I met a woman named Elza Hász.”

Madame Morgenstern’s face drained of color. “Yes?” she said.

“I went to her house on Benczúr utca. She’d seen me exchanging pengő for francs at the bank, and wanted to send a box to her son in Paris. There was another woman there, an older woman, who asked me to carry something else. A letter to a certain C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. About whom I must not inquire.”

Madame Morgenstern had gone so pale that Andras thought she might faint. When the waiter arrived a moment later with their drinks, she took up her Brunelle and emptied half the glass.

“I think you’re Klara Hász,” he said, lowering his voice. “Or you were. And the woman I met was your mother.”

Her mouth trembled, and she glanced toward the door. For a moment she looked as if she might flee. Then she sank back into her seat, a tense stillness coming over her body. “All right,” she said. “Tell me what you know, and what you want.” Her voice had thinned to a whisper; she sounded, more than anything, afraid.

“I don’t know anything,” he said, reaching for her hand again. “I don’t want anything. I just wanted to tell you what happened. What a strange coincidence it was. And I wanted you to know I’d met your mother. I know you haven’t seen her in years.”

“And you carried a box for my nephew József?” she said. “Have you spoken to him about this? About me?”

“No, not a word.”

“Thank God,” she said. “You can’t, do you understand?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t understand. I don’t know what any of this means. Your mother begged me not to speak to anyone about that letter, and I haven’t. No one knows. Or almost no one-I did show it to my brother when I came home from your mother’s house. He thought it must be a love letter.”

Klara gave a sad laugh. “A love letter! I suppose it was, in a way.”

“I wish you’d tell me what this is all about.”

“It’s a private matter. I’m sorry you had to be involved. I can’t make direct contact with my family in Budapest, and they can’t send anything directly to me. József can’t know I’m here. You’re certain you haven’t told him anything?”

“Nothing at all,” Andras said. “Your mother mentioned that specifically.”

“I’m sorry to make such a drama of it. But it’s very important that you understand. Some terrible things happened in Budapest when I was a girl. I’m safe now, but only as long as no one knows I’m here, or who I was before I came here.”

Andras repeated his vow. If his silence would protect her, he would keep silent. If she had asked him to sign his pledge in blood upon the gray marble of the café table, he would have taken a knife to his hand and done it. Instead she finished her drink, not speaking, not meeting his eyes. He watched the silver harp tremble at her throat.

“What did my mother look like?” she asked finally. “Has her hair gone gray?”

“It’s shot with gray,” Andras said. “She wore a black dress. She’s a tiny person, like you.” He told her a few things about the visit-what the house had looked like, what her sister-in-law had said. He didn’t tell her about her mother’s grief, about the expression of entrenched mourning he had remembered all this time; what good could it have done? But he told her a few things about József Hász-how he’d given Andras a place to stay when he’d first come to town, and had advised him about life in the Latin Quarter.

“And what about György?” she asked. “József’s father?”

“Your brother.”

“That’s right,” she said, quietly. “Did you see him, too?”

“No,” Andras said. “I was there only for an hour or so, in the middle of the day. He must have been at work. From the look of the house, though, I’d say he’s doing fine.”

Klara put a hand to her temple. “It’s rather difficult to take this in. I think this is enough for now,” she said, and then, “I think I’d better go.” But when she stood to put on her coat, she swayed and caught the edge of the table with her hand.

“You haven’t eaten, have you?” Andras said.

“I need to be someplace quiet.”

“There’s a restaurant-”

“Not a restaurant.”

“I live a few blocks from here. Come have a cup of tea. Then I’ll take you home.”

And so they went to his garret, climbing the bare wooden stairs to the top of 34 rue des Écoles, all the way to his drafty and barren room. He offered her the desk chair, but she didn’t want to sit. She stood at the window and looked down into the street, at the Collège de France across the way, where the clochards always sat on the steps at night, even in the coldest weather. One of them was playing a harmonica; the music made Andras think of the vast open grasslands he’d seen in American movies at the tiny cinema in Konyár. As Klara listened, he lit a fire in the grate, toasted a few slices of bread, and heated water for tea. He had only one glass-the jam jar he’d been using ever since his first morning at the apartment. But he had some sugar cubes, pilfered from the bowl at the Blue Dove. He handed the glass to Klara and she stirred sugar into her tea with his one spoon. He wished she would speak, wished she would reveal the terrible secret of her past, whatever it was. He couldn’t guess the details of her story, though he suspected it must have had something to do with Elisabet: an accidental pregnancy, a jealous lover, angry relatives, some unspeakable shame.

A draft came through the ill-fitting casement, and Klara shivered. She handed him the glass of tea. “You have some too,” she said. “Before it gets cold.”

His throat closed with a spasm of emotion. For the first time, she’d addressed him with the familiar te instead of the formal maga. “No,” he said. “I made it for you.” For you: te. He offered it to her again, and she closed her hands around his own. The tea trembled between them in its glass. She took it and set it down on the windowsill. Then she moved toward him, put her arms around his waist, tucked her dark head under his chin. He raised a hand to stroke her back, disbelieving his luck, worrying that this closeness was ill-gotten, the product of his revelation and her stirred emotions. But as she shivered against him he forgot to care what had brought them to that moment. He let his hand move along the curve of her back, allowed himself to trace the architecture of her spine. She was so close he could feel the jolt of her ribcage as she pulled a sharp breath; an instant later she moved away from him, shaking her head.

He lifted his hands, surrendering. But she was already retrieving her coat from the rack, winding her scarf around her neck, putting on the red bell-shaped hat.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”

…

At seven o’clock the next evening he went to see the Spectacle d’Hiver. The Sarah-Bernhardt was filled with the families of the dancers, an anxious chattering crowd. The parents had all brought ribboned cones of roses for their daughters. The aisles were draped with fir garland, and the theater smelled of rose and pine. The scent seemed to wake him from the haze in which he’d lived since the previous night. She was backstage; in two hours’ time he would see her.

Violins began to play in the orchestra pit, and the curtain rose to reveal six girls dressed in white leotards and jagged points of tulle. They seemed to levitate above the silvered floorboards, their movements dreamlike and precise. It was the way she moved, he thought. She had distilled her sharpness, her fluidity, into these little girls, into the forming vessels of their bodies. He felt as if he were caught in a strange dream; something seemed to have broken in him the night before. He had no idea how to behave in a situation like this. Nothing in his life had prepared him for it. Nor could he imagine what she might have been thinking-what she must think of him now, after he’d touched her that way. He would have liked to run backstage that moment and get it over with, whatever was going to happen.

But at intermission, when he might really have gone backstage, he was hit by a wave of panic so deep and cold he could hardly breathe. He went downstairs to the men’s washroom, where he locked himself into a stall and tried to slow his racing pulse. He leaned his forehead against the cool marble of the wall. The voices of men all around him had a soothing effect; they were fathers, they sounded like fathers. He could almost imagine that when he came out, his own father would be waiting. Lucky Béla, though sparing with words of advice, would tell him what to do. But when he came out, no one he knew was waiting; he was alone in Paris, and Klara was upstairs.

The lights flickered to signal the end of the intermission. He went up and took his seat again just as the house fell into darkness. A few rustling moments, and then blue lights glowed from the lighting bar beneath the catwalk; a high cold string of woodwind notes climbed from the orchestra pit, and the snowflakes drifted out to begin their dance. He knew Klara was standing just behind the stage-left curtain. She was the one who had signaled the musicians to begin. The girls danced perfectly, and were replaced by taller girls, and after that taller girls still, as if the same girls were growing older backstage during the moments when the lights dimmed. But at the end of the show they all came onstage to bow, and they called out for their teacher.

She came out in a simple black dress, an orange-red dahlia pinned behind her ear, like a girl in a Mucha painting. First she made her révérence to the young dancers, then to the audience. She acknowledged the musicians and the conductor. Then she disappeared into the wings again, allowing the girls to reap the glory of their curtain calls.

Andras sensed the return of his panic, heard its millipedal footsteps drawing closer. Before it could take him again he slid out of his row and ran backstage, where Klara was surrounded by a mass of rouged, tulle-skirted girls. He couldn’t get anywhere near her. But she seemed to be looking for him, or for someone in particular; she let her gaze drift over the heads of the little girls and move toward the darker edges of the wings. Her eyes flickered past him and returned for an instant. He couldn’t tell if her smile had darkened just at that moment, or if he had imagined it. In any case, she’d seen him. He took off his hat and stood twisting its brim until the crowd around her began to subside. As the parents rushed backstage to bestow bouquets on their children, he cursed himself for failing to bring flowers. He saw that many of the parents had brought roses for her as well as for their daughters. She would have a cartload of bouquets to bring home, none of them from him. The father of the bespectacled little Sophie had brought a particularly large sheaf of flowers for Madame-red roses, Andras noted. He saw her cordially refuse countless invitations to celebratory post-performance dinners; she claimed she was exhausted and must have her rest. It was nearly an hour before the little girls had all gone home with their families, leaving Klara and Andras alone backstage. He had twisted his hat entirely out of shape by then. Her arms were full of flowers; he couldn’t embrace her or even take her hand.

“You didn’t have to wait,” she said, giving him a half-reproachful smile.

“You’ve got a lot of roses there” was what he managed to say.

“Have you had dinner?”

He hadn’t, and he told her so. In the prop room he found a basket for her flowers. He loaded it and covered it with a cloth to protect the roses from the cold. As he helped her into her coat, he received a wondering look from Pély, the custodian, who had already begun to sweep up the evening’s snowfall of sequins and rose petals. Andras raised his hat in farewell and they went out through the backstage door.

She took his arm as they walked along, and let him lead her to a whitewashed café near the Bastille. It was a place he’d passed many times in his walks around Paris; it was called Aux Marocaines. On the low tables were green bowls of cardamom pods. On the walls, wooden racks held Moroccan pottery. Everything seemed to be built on a small scale, as if made for Klara. He could afford to buy her dinner there, though just barely; a week earlier he had received a Christmas bonus from Monsieur Novak.

A waiter in a fez seated them shoulder to shoulder at a corner table. There was flatbread and honey wine, a piece of grilled fish, a vegetable stew in a clay pot. As they ate they talked only about the performance, and about Elisabet, who had departed with Marthe for Chamonix; they talked about Andras’s work, and about his examinations, which he’d passed with top marks. But he was always aware of her heat and movement beside him, her arm brushing his arm. When she drank, he watched her lips touch the rim of the glass. He couldn’t stop looking at the curve of her breasts beneath her close-wrapped dress.

After dinner they had strong coffee and tiny pink macaroons. Still, neither of them had mentioned what had happened the previous night-not their conversation about her family, nor what had passed between them afterward. A time or two Andras thought he saw a shadow move across her features; he waited for her to reproach him, to say she wished he’d never told her that he’d met her mother and sister-in-law, or that she hadn’t meant to give him a mistaken impression. When she didn’t, he began to wonder if she meant for them to pretend it had never happened. At the end of the meal he paid the bill, despite her protests; he helped her into her coat again and they walked toward the rue de Sévigné. He carried the heavy basket of flowers, thinking of the ridiculous bouquet he’d brought to that first Sunday lunch. How ignorant he’d been of what was about to befall him, how unprepared for everything he’d experienced since-the shock of attraction, the torment of her closeness on Sunday afternoons, the guilty pleasure of their growing familiarity, and then that unthinkable moment last night when she’d closed her hands around his hands-when she’d put her arms around his waist, her head against his chest. And what would happen now? The evening was almost over. They had nearly reached her house. A light snow began to fall as they rounded the corner of her street.

At the doorstep her eyes darkened again. She leaned against the door and sighed, looking down at the roses. “Funny,” she said. “We’ve done the winter show every December for years, but I always feel this way afterward. Like there’s nothing to look forward to. Like everything’s finished.” She smiled. “Dramatic, isn’t it?”

He let out a long breath. “I’m sorry if-last night,” he began.

She stopped him with a shake of her head and told him there was nothing to apologize for.

“I shouldn’t have asked about your family,” he said. “If you’d wanted to talk about it, you would have.”

“Probably not,” she said. “It’s become such a habit with me, keeping everything secret.” She shook her head again, and he experienced the return of a memory from his early childhood-a night he’d spent hiding in the orchard while his brother Mátyás lay in bed, gravely ill with fever. A doctor had been called in, plasters applied, medicines dispensed, all to no effect; the fever rose and rose, and everyone seemed to believe Mátyás would die. Meanwhile, Andras hid in the branches of an apple tree with his terrible secret: He himself had passed the fever along, playing with Mátyás after their mother told him he must keep away at all costs. If Mátyás died, it would be his fault. He had never been so lonely in his life. Now he touched Klara’s shoulder and felt her shiver.

“You’re cold,” he said.

She shook her head. Then she took her key from her little purse and turned to unlock the door. But her hand began to tremble, and she turned back toward him and raised her face to him. He bent to her and brushed the corner of her mouth with his lips.

“Come in,” she said. “Just for a moment.”

His pulse thundering at his temples, Andras stepped in after her. He put a hand at her waist and drew her toward him. She looked up at him, her eyes wet, and then he lifted her against him and kissed her. He closed the door with one hand. Held her. Kissed her again. Took off his thin jacket, unbuttoned the glossy black buttons of her coat, pushed it from her shoulders. He stood in the entryway with her and kissed her and kissed her-first her mouth, then her neck at the margins of her dress, then the hollow between her breasts. He untied the black silk ribbon at her waist. The dress fell around her feet in a dark pool, and there she was before him in a rose-colored slip and stockings, the red-gold dahlia in her hair. He buried his hands in her dark curls and drew her to him. She kissed him again and slid her hands under his shirt. He heard himself saying her name; again he touched the bead-row of her spine, the curve of her hips. She lifted herself against him. It couldn’t be true; it was true.

They went upstairs to her bedroom. He would remember it as long as he lived: the way they moved awkwardly through the doorway, his persistent certainty that she would change her mind, his disbelief as she lifted the rose-colored slip over her head. The quick work she made of his embarrassing sock braces, his poorly darned socks, his underclothes worn to transparency. The shallow curves of her dancer’s body, the neat tuck of her navel, the shadow between her legs. The cool embrace of her bed, her own bed. The softness of her skin. Her breasts. His certainty that it would all be over in an embarrassing flash the instant she touched him with her hand; his wild concentration on anything else as she did it. The word baiser in his mind. The unbearable thrill of being able to touch her. The shock of the heat inside her. It could have all ended then-the city of Paris, the world, the universe-and he wouldn’t have cared, would have died happy, could have found no heaven broader or more drenched with light.

Afterward they lay on the bed and he stared at the ceiling, at its pattern of pressed flowers and leaves. She turned onto her side and put a hand on his chest. A velvety drowsiness pinned him to the bed, his head on her pillow. Her scent was in his hair, on his hands, everywhere.

“Klara,” he said. “Am I dead? Are you still here?”

“I’m still here,” she said. “You’re not dead.”

“What are we supposed to do now?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just lie here for a little while.”

“All right,” he said, and lay there.

After a few minutes she removed her hand from his chest and rolled away from him, then got out of bed and went off down the hall. A moment later he heard the thunder of running water and the low roar and hiss of a gas heater. When she reappeared in the bedroom doorway, she was wearing a dressing gown.

“Come have a bath,” she said.

She didn’t have to coax him. He followed her into the white-tiled bathroom, where water steamed into the porcelain tub. She let the dressing gown drop and climbed into the water as he stood watching, speechless. He could have stood there all night while she bathed. Her image burned itself into his retinas: the small, high breasts; the twin wings of her hips; the smooth plane of her belly. And now, in the electric light of the bathroom, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before: a crescent-shaped scar with faint stitch-marks, just above the neat dark triangle of her hair. He stepped forward to touch her. He ran his hand along her belly, down to the scar, and brushed it with his fingers.

“She was a difficult birth,” Klara said. “In the end, a cesarean. She was too much for me, even then.”

Andras had an unbidden vision of Klara as a fifteen-year-old, straining upward on a metal table. The image hit him like a train. His knees seemed to liquefy, and he had to brace himself against the wall.

“Come in with me,” she said, and gave him her hand. He climbed into the bathtub and sank down into the water. She took the cloth and washed him from head to toe; she poured shampoo into her hands and massaged it into his scalp. Then they made love again, slowly, in the bathtub, and she showed him how to touch her, and he concluded that his life was over, that he would never want to do anything else in this lifetime. Then he washed her as she had washed him, every inch of her, and then they staggered to bed.

Nothing in his life had prepared him to imagine that a series of days might be spent the way they spent the next ten days. Later, in the darkest moments of the years that followed, he would come back again and again to those days, reminding himself that if he died, and if death led him into formless silence instead of into some other brighter life, he would still have experienced those days with Klara Morgenstern.

The Brecht play had gone dark for the holidays; Elisabet would be in Chamonix until the second of January. The studio was closed; school was out until after the new year; Andras’s friends had gone home for the duration. Mrs. Apfel had gone to her daughter-in-law’s cottage in Aixen-Provence. Even the signs advertising meetings of anti-Jewish organizations had ceased to appear. At all hours of the day, the streets were filled with people out shopping or on their way to parties. Klara had been invited to half a dozen parties herself, but she cancelled all her engagements. Andras went to his cold attic for some articles of clothing and his sketchbooks, locked the door behind him, and decamped to the rue de Sévigné.

They went on an expedition for provisions: potatoes for potato pancakes, cold roast chicken, bread, cheese, wine, a cake packed with currants. At a music shop on rue Montmartre they bought records for five francs apiece, comic operettas and American jazz and ballets. With their arms full and their pockets empty, they returned to Klara’s apartment and set up house. Chanukah began that night. They made potato pancakes, filling the kitchen with the rich smell of hot oil, and they lit candles. They made love in the kitchen and in the bedroom and once, awkwardly, on the stairs. The next day they went skating at the other skating pond, the one at the Bois de Boulogne, where they were unlikely to see anyone they knew. The skaters at the park wore bright colors against the gray of the afternoon; there was a marked-off patch at the center of the ice where the more adroit among them executed spins. Andras and Klara skated until their lips were blue with cold. Every night they bathed together; every morning they woke and made love. Andras received an astonishing education in the ways a human being could experience pleasure. At night, when he woke and thought of Klara, it amazed him that he could turn over and curl himself around her. He surprised her with his knowledge of cookery, gained from watching his mother. He could make palacsinta, thin egg pancakes, with chocolate or jam or apple filling; he could make paprikás burgonya and spaetzle, and red cabbage with caraway seeds. They slept long and gloriously in the afternoons. They made love in the middle of the day on Klara’s white bed while freezing rain fell outside. They made love late at night in the dance studio, on rugs they’d dragged down from upstairs. One time, on the way home from a café, they made love against the wall in an alleyway.

They celebrated New Year’s Eve at the Bastille, with thousands of other cheering Parisians. Afterward they drank a bottle of champagne in the sitting room and ate a feast of cold paté and bread and cheese and cornichons. Neither of them wanted to sleep, knowing that the next day would be the last of that string of impossible days. When dawn broke, instead of going to bed they put on coats and hats and went walking by the river. The sun cast its gold light onto the buttresses of Notre-Dame; the streets were full of cabs taking drowsy revelers home to their apartments. They sat on a bench in the dead garden at the eastern tip of Île St.-Louis and kissed each other’s freezing hands, and Andras dredged from his mind a Marot poem he’d learned with Professor Vago:

D’Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige

Anne (par jeu) me jecta de la Neige

Que je cuidoys froide certainement;

Mais estoit feu, l’experience en ay-je;

Car embrasé je fuz soubdainement.

Puis que le feu loge secretement

Dedans la Neige, où trouveray je place

Pour n’ardre point? Anne, ta seule grace

Estaindre peult le feu que je sens bien,

Non point par Eau, par Neige, ne par Glace,

Mais par sentir un feu pareil au mien.

And when she protested against sixteenth-century French after a night of sleeplessness and drinking, he whispered another version into her ear, a spontaneous Hungarian translation of that hot exchange between the poet Marot and his girlfriend: as a game Anne threw snow at him, and it was cold, of course. But what he felt was heat, because he found himself in her arms. If fire dwelt secretly in snow, how could he escape burning? Only Anne’s mercy could control the flame. Not with water, snow, nor ice, but with a fire like his own.

When he woke that afternoon, Klara lay fast asleep beside him, her hair tangled on the pillows. He got up, pulled on his trousers, washed his face. His head throbbed. He cleaned up the remnants of the previous night’s sitting-room picnic, made coffee in the kitchen, drank a slow black cup and rubbed his temples. He wanted Klara to be awake, to be with him, but he didn’t want to wake her. So he refilled his cup and roamed the apartment by himself. He walked through the empty dining room, where they’d had their first lunch together; he walked through the sitting room, where he’d seen her for the first time. He took a long look at the bathroom with its miraculous hot-water heater, where they’d spent long hours bathing. Finally, in the hall, he paused before Elisabet’s bedroom. Their travels through the rooms had never taken them there, but now he pushed the door open. Elisabet’s room was surprisingly neat; her dresses hung in a limp row in the open wardrobe. Two pairs of brown shoes were ranged underneath: a caramel-colored pair on the left, a chestnut-colored pair on the right. On the dresser there was a wooden music box with tulips painted on the lid. A silver comb stood upright between the bristles of a silver brush. An empty perfume flask glowed yellow-green. He opened the top dresser drawer: grayish cotton underwear and grayish cotton brassieres. A few handkerchiefs. Some frayed hair ribbons. A broken slide rule. A tube of epoxy rolled tight all the way to its tip. Six cigarettes bound with a strip of paper.

He closed the drawer and sat down in the little wooden chair beside the bed. He looked at the yellow coverlet, at the rag doll keeping watch over the silent room, and considered how furious Elisabet would be if she knew what had happened in her absence. Though there was some small hint of triumph in the feeling, there was also a sense of fear; if she found out, he knew she wouldn’t stand for it. He couldn’t know what effect her anger might have upon her mother, but at the very least he knew that Klara’s ties to Elisabet were far stronger than her tenuous ties to him. The scar on her belly reminded him of it every time they made love.

He turned and left the little room, and went to Klara where she lay sleeping on the tumbled bed. She had curled herself around the pillow he’d been using. She was naked, her legs tangled in the eiderdown. In the silvery northern light of the winter afternoon, he could see the hairline creases at the corners of her eyes, the faint signs of her age. He loved her, wanted her, felt himself stirring again at the sight of her. He knew he would be willing to give his life to protect her. He wanted to take her to Budapest and heal whatever terrible hurt had occurred there, see her walk into the drawing room of that house on Benczúr utca and put her hands into her mother’s hands. His eyes burned at the thought that he was only twenty-two, a student, unable to do anything of substance for her. The lives they’d been leading those past ten days hadn’t been their real lives. They hadn’t worked, hadn’t taken care of anyone but themselves, hadn’t had much need for money. But money was an ever-present woe for him. It would be years before he’d have a steady income. If his studies went as planned, it would be another four and a half years before he became an architect. And he’d lived long enough already, and had faced enough difficulty, to know that things seldom went as planned.

He touched her shoulder. She opened her gray eyes and looked at him. “What is it?” she said. She sat up and held the eiderdown against herself. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing’s happened,” he said, sitting down beside her. “I’ve just been thinking about what’s to happen after.”

“Oh, Andras,” she said, and smiled drowsily. “Not that. That’s my least favorite subject at the moment.”

This was the way it had gone, anytime either of them had introduced the topic over the past week or so; they had turned it aside, allowed it to drift away as they drifted into another series of pleasures. It was easy enough to do; their real lives had come to seem far less real than the one they were leading together on the rue de Sévigné. But now their time was nearly finished. They couldn’t avoid the subject any longer.

“We have six more hours,” he said. “Then our lives begin again.”

She slipped her arms around him. “I know.”

“I want to have everything with you,” he said. “A real life. God help me! I want you beside me at night, every night. I want to have a child with you.” He had not yet said these things aloud; he could feel the blood rushing to his skin as he spoke.

Klara was silent for a long moment. She dropped her arms, sat back against the pillows, put her hand in his. “I have a child already,” she said.

“Elisabet’s not a child.” But those vulnerable shoes at the bottom of the closet. The painted box on the dresser. The hidden cigarettes.

“She’s my daughter,” Klara said. “She’s what I’ve lived for these sixteen years. I can’t just take up another life.”

“I know. But I can’t not see you, either.”

“Perhaps it would be best, though,” she said, and looked away from him. Her voice had fallen almost to a whisper. “Perhaps it would be best to stop with what we’ve had. Our lives may spoil it.”

But what would his life be without her, now that he knew what it was to be with her? He wanted to weep, or to take her by the shoulders and shake her. “Is that what you’ve thought all along?” he said. “That this was a lark? That when our lives began again it would be over?”

“I didn’t think about what would happen,” she said. “I didn’t want to. But we’ve got to think about it now.”

He got out of bed and took his shirt and trousers from a chair. He couldn’t look at her. “What good will that do?” he said. “You’ve already decided it’s impossible.”

“Please, Andras,” she said. “Don’t go.”

“Why should I stay?”

“Don’t be angry at me. Don’t leave like that.”

“I’m not angry,” he said. But he finished dressing, then retrieved his suitcase from beneath the bed and began to pack the few articles of clothing he’d brought from the rue des Écoles.

“There are things you don’t know about me,” she said. “Things that might frighten you, or change the way you felt.”

“That’s right,” he said. “And there’s a great deal you don’t know about me. But what does that matter now?”

“Don’t be cruel to me,” she said. “I’m as unhappy as you are.”

He wanted to believe that it was true, but it couldn’t have been; he’d laid himself open before her and she’d withdrawn from him. He put his last few things in the suitcase and snapped the latches, then went into the hallway and took his coat from the rack. She followed him to the top of the stairs, where she stood barefoot and bare-shouldered, the sheet wrapped around her as though she were a Greek sculpture. He buttoned his coat. He couldn’t believe he was going to walk down the stairs and through the door, not knowing when he’d see her again. He put a hand to her arm. Touched her shoulder. Tugged a corner of the sheet so that it fell from her body. In the dim hallway she stood naked before him. He couldn’t bear to look at her, couldn’t bear to touch or kiss her. And so he did what a moment before had seemed unimaginable: He descended the stairs, past the eyes of all those child dancers in their ethereal costumes, opened the door, and left her.