The Invisible Bridge

CHAPTER TWELVE. What Happened at the Studio

CLASSES BEGAN the first Monday of January with a two-day charrette. Within a span of forty-eight hours they had to design a freestanding living space of fifty meters square, with a movable wall, two windows, a bath, a galley kitchen. They would submit a front elevation of the building, a floor plan, and a model. Forty-eight hours, during which anyone who cared about the project wouldn’t eat a meal or sleep or leave the studio. Andras took the project like an oblivion drug, felt the crush of time in his veins, willed it to make him forget his ten days with Klara. He bent over the plane of his worktable and made it the landscape of his mind. The Gare d’Orsay critique had left its imprint; he vowed that he would not be humiliated before the rest of the class, before that smug Lemarque and the ranks of the upperclassmen. Toward the end of his thirtieth waking hour he looked at his design and found that what he’d drawn was his parents’ house in Konyár, with a few details changed. One bedroom, not two. An indoor bath instead of the tin tub and outhouse. A modern indoor kitchen. One external wall had become a movable wall; it could be opened in summer to let the house communicate with the garden. The façade was plain and white with a many-paned window. On his second sleepless night he drew the movable wall as a curve; when it was open it would make a shady niche. He drew a stone bench in the garden, a circular reflecting pool. His parents’ house made over into a country retreat. He feared it was absurd, that everyone would see it for what it was: a Hajdú boy’s design, rude and primitive. He turned it in at the last minute and received, to his surprise, an appreciative nod and a paragraph of closely written praise from Vago, and the grudging approval of even the harshest fifth-year students.

At the Bernhardt they struck the set of The Mother and held auditions for Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna. Though Zoltán Novak pleaded, Madame Gérard would not take a role in the new play; she’d already been offered the role of Lady Macbeth at the Thêátre des Ambassadeurs, and Novak couldn’t pay her what they would. Andras was grateful for her impending departure. He couldn’t look at her without thinking of Klara, without wondering whether Madame Gérard knew what had happened between them. The day before she departed for the Ambassadeurs he helped her box up her dressing room: her Chinese robe, her tea things, her makeup, a thousand fan letters and postcards and little presents. As they worked she told him about the members of the new company she would join, two of whom had been featured in American films, and one of whom had appeared with Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet. He found it difficult to pay attention. He wanted to tell her what had happened. He had told no one; even to have told his friends at school would have reduced it somehow, made it seem a superficial and fleeting liaison. But Madame Gérard knew Klara; she would know what it meant. She might even be able to offer some hope. So he closed the dressing-room door and confessed it all, omitting only the revelation about the letter.

Madame Gérard listened gravely. When he’d finished, she got to her feet and paced the green rug in front of the dressing-room mirror as if bringing a monologue to mind. At last she turned and put her hands on the backrest of her makeup chair. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew, and I ought to have said something. When I saw you at the Bois de Vincennes, I knew. You didn’t care at all for the girl. You looked only at Klara. I’ll admit,” and she turned her eyes from him, laughing ruefully to herself, “old as I am, I was a little jealous. But I never thought you’d act upon your feelings.”

Andras rubbed his palms against his thighs. “I shouldn’t have,” he said.

“It’s well she ended it,” Madame Gérard said. “She knew it wasn’t right. She invited you into her house thinking you might be a friend to her daughter. You should have stopped going once you knew you didn’t care for Elisabet.”

“It was too late by then,” he said. “I couldn’t stop.”

“You don’t know Klara,” Madame Gérard said. “You can’t, not after a few Sunday lunches and a week-long affair. She’s never made any man happy. She’s had ample chance to fall in love-and, if you’ll pardon me, with grown men, not first-year architecture students. Don’t imagine she hasn’t had plenty of suitors. If she ever does take a man seriously, it’ll be because she wants to get married-that is to say, because she wants someone to ease her life, to take care of her. Which you, my dear, are in no position to do.”

“You don’t have to remind me of that.”

“Well, someone must, apparently!”

“But what now?” he demanded. “I can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”

“Why not? It’s over between the two of you. You said as much yourself.”

“It’s not over for me. I can’t put her out of my mind.”

“I’d advise you to try,” Madame Gérard said. “She can’t be any good to you.”

“That’s all, then? I’m supposed to forget her?”

“That would be best.”

“Impossible,” he said.

“Poor darling,” Madame Gérard said. “I’m sorry. But you’ll get over it. Young men do.” She turned again to her packing, loading her gold and silver makeup sticks into a box with dozens of little drawers. A private smile came to her mouth; she rolled a tube of rouge between her fingers and turned to him. “You’ve joined an illustrious club, you know, now that Klara’s thrown you over. Most men never make it that far.”

“Please,” he said. “I can’t bear to hear you speak of her that way.”

“It’s the girl’s father, you know. I think she must still be in love with him.”

“Elisabet’s father,” he said. “Is he here in Paris? Does she still see him?”

“Oh, no. He died many years ago, as I understand it. But death isn’t a bar to love, as you may learn someday.”

“Who was he?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. Klara keeps her history close.”

“So it’s hopeless, then. I’m supposed to let it go because she’s in love with a dead man.”

“Allow it to be what it was: a pretty episode. The satisfaction of a mutual curiosity.”

“That wasn’t what it was to me.”

She tilted her head at him and smiled again, that terrible all-knowing smile. “I’m afraid I’m the wrong person to dispense advice about love. Unless you’d like to be disabused of your romantic notions.”

“You’ll excuse me, then, if I leave you to your packing.”

“My dear boy, no excuse needed.” She rose, kissed him on both cheeks, and turned him out into the hall. There was no choice for him but to go back to his work; he did it in mute consternation, wishing he had never confided in her.

There was one great source of relief, one astonishing piece of news that had arrived in a telegram from Budapest: Tibor was coming to visit. His classes in Modena would start at the end of January, but before he went to Italy he would come to Paris for a week. When the telegram arrived, Andras had shouted the news aloud into the stairwell of the building, at a volume that had brought the concierge out into the hall to reprimand him for disturbing the other tenants. He silenced her by kissing her on the brow and showing her the telegram: Tibor was coming! Tibor, his older brother. The concierge voiced the hope that this older brother would beat some manners into Andras, and left him in the hall to experience his delight alone. Andras hadn’t mentioned Klara in his letters to Tibor, but he felt as if Tibor knew-as if Tibor had sensed that Andras was in distress and had decided to come for that reason.

The anticipation of the visit-three weeks away, then two, then one-got him from home to school, and from school to work. Now that The Mother was finished and Madame Gérard gone, afternoons at the Sarah-Bernhardt passed at a maddening crawl. He had arranged everything so well backstage that there was little to do while the actors rehearsed; he paced behind the curtain, subject to an increasing fear that Monsieur Novak would discover his superfluity. One afternoon, after he’d overseen the delivery of a load of lumber for the set of Fuente Ovejuna, he approached the head carpenter and offered his services as a set builder. The head carpenter put him to work. During the afternoon hours Andras banged flats together; after hours he studied the design of the new sets. This was a different kind of architecture, all about illusion and impression: perspective flattened to make spaces look deeper, hidden doors through which actors might materialize or disappear, pieces that could be turned backward or inside out to create new tableaux. He began to mull over the design in bed at night, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Klara. The false fronts that represented the Spanish town might be put on wheels and rotated, he thought; their opposite sides could be painted to represent the building interiors. He made a set of sketches showing how it might be done, and later he redrew the sketches as plans. His second week as assistant set builder he went to the head carpenter and showed him the work. The carpenter asked him if he thought he had a budget of a million francs. Andras told him it would cost less than building the two sets of flats that would be required to make separate exteriors and interiors. The head carpenter scratched his head and said he’d consult the set designer. The set designer, a tall round-shouldered man with an ill-trimmed moustache and a monocle, scrutinized the plans and asked Andras why he was still working as a gofer. Did he want a job that would pay three times what he was making now? The set designer had an independent shop on the rue des Lombards and generally employed an assistant, but his most recent one had just finished his coursework at the Beaux-Arts and had taken a position outside the capital.

Andras did want the job. But Zoltán Novak had saved his life; he couldn’t very well walk out on the Sarah-Bernhardt. He accepted the man’s business card and stared at it all that night, wondering what to do.

The next afternoon he went to Novak’s office to lay the situation before him. There was a long silence after he knocked, then the sound of male voices in argument; the door flew open to reveal a pair of men in pinstriped suits, briefcases in hand, their faces flushed as though Novak had been insulting them in the vilest terms. The men clapped hats onto their heads and walked out past Andras without a nod or glance. Inside the office Novak stood at his desk with his hands on the blotter, watching the men recede down the hallway. When they’d disappeared, he came out from behind the desk and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey from the decanter on the sideboard. He looked over his shoulder at Andras and pointed to a glass. Andras raised a hand and shook his head.

“Please,” Novak said. “I insist.” He poured whiskey and added water.

Andras had never seen Novak drinking before dusk. He accepted the tumbler and sat down in one of the ancient leather chairs.

“Egészségedre,” Novak said. He lifted his glass, drained it, set it down on the blotter. “Can you guess who that was, leaving?”

“No,” Andras said. “But they looked rather grim.”

“They’re our money men. The people who’ve always managed to persuade the city to let us keep our doors open.”

“And?”

Novak sat back in his chair and laced his hands into a mountain. “Fifty-seven people,” he said. “That’s how many I have to fire today, according to those men. Including myself, and you.”

“But that’s everyone,” Andras said.

“Precisely,” he said. “They’re closing us down. We’re finished until next season, at least. They can’t support us any longer, even though we’ve posted profits all fall. The Mother did better than any other show in Paris, you know. But it wasn’t enough. This place is a money-sink. Do you know what it costs to heat five stories of open space?”

Andras took a swallow of whiskey and felt the false warmth of it move through his chest. “What will you do?” he said.

“What will you do?” Novak said. “And what will the actors do? And Madame Courbet? And Claudel, and Pély, and all the others? It’s a disaster. We’re not the only ones, either. They’re closing four theaters.” He sat back in his chair and stroked his moustache with one finger, his eyes moving over the bookshelves. “The fact is, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Madame Novak is in a delicate condition, as they say. She’s been pining for her parents in Budapest. I’m sure she’ll take this as a sign that we should return home.”

“But you’d rather stay,” Andras said.

Novak released a sigh from the broad bellows of his chest. “I understand how Edith feels. This isn’t our home. We’ve scratched out our little corner here, but none of it belongs to us. We’re Hungarians, in the end, not French.”

“When I met you in Vienna, I thought no man could look more Parisian.”

“Now you see how green you were,” Novak said, and smiled sadly. “But what about you? I know you’ve got your school fees to pay.”

Andras told him about the offer of an assistantship with the set designer, Monsieur Forestier, and how he’d just been coming to ask Novak’s advice on the matter.

Novak brought his hands together, a single beat of applause. “It would have been a terrible shame to lose you,” he said. “But it’s an excellent chance, and well timed. You’ve got to do it, of course.”

“I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done,” Andras said.

“You’re a good young man. You’ve worked hard here. I’ve never regretted taking you on.” He drained the rest of his drink and pushed the empty glass across the desk. “Now, would you fill that again for me? I’ve got to go break the news to the others. You’ll come to work tomorrow, I hope. There’ll be a great deal to do, getting this place closed down. You’ll have to tell Forestier I can’t release you until the end of the month.”

“Tomorrow, as usual,” Andras said.

He went home that evening with a frightening sense of vacancy in his chest. No more Sarah-Bernhardt. No more Monsieur Novak. No more Claudel, or Pély; no more Marcelle Gérard. And no more Klara, no more Klara. The hard white shell of his life punctured and blown clean. He was light now, hollow, an empty egg. Hollow and light, he drifted home through the January wind. At 34 rue des Écoles he climbed the flights and flights of stairs-how many hundreds of them were there?-feeling he didn’t have the energy to look at his books that night, nor even to wash his face or change for bed. He wanted only to lie down in his trousers and shoes and overcoat, pull the eiderdown over his head, ride out the hours before dawn. But at the top of the stairs he saw a line of light coming from beneath his own door, and when he put a hand on the doorknob he found it unlocked. He pushed the door open and let it swing. A fire in the grate; bread and wine on the table; in the single chair with a book in her hands, Klara.

“Te,” he said. You.

“And you,” she said.

“How did you get in?”

“I told the concierge it was your birthday. I said I was planning a surprise.”

“And what did you tell your daughter?”

She looked down at the cover of her book. “I told her I was going to see a friend.”

“What a shame that wasn’t true.”

She got to her feet, crossed the room to him, put her hands on his arms. “Please, Andras,” she said. “Don’t speak to me that way.”

He moved away from her and took off his coat, his scarf. For what felt like a long time he couldn’t say anything more; he went to the fireplace and crossed his arms, looking down into a faltering pyramid of bright coals. “It was bad enough, not knowing whether or not I’d see you again,” he said. “I told myself we were finished, but I couldn’t convince myself it was true. Finally I confided in Marcelle. She was kind enough to tell me I wasn’t alone in my misery. She said I belonged to an illustrious club of men you’d thrown over.”

Her gray eyes darkened. “Thrown over? Is that what you feel I’ve done to you?”

“Thrown over, jettisoned, sent packing. I don’t suppose it matters what you call it.”

“We decided it was impossible.”

“You decided.”

She went to him and moved her hands over his arms, and when she looked up into his face he saw there were tears in her eyes. To his horror his own eyes began to burn. This was Klara, whose name he’d carried with him from Budapest; Klara, whose voice came to him in his sleep.

“What do you want?” he said into her hair. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I’ve been miserable,” she said. “I can’t let it go. I want to know you, Andras.”

“And I want to know you,” he said. “I don’t like secrecy.” But he knew as he said it that what was hidden made her all the more attractive; there was a kind of torment in her unknowability, in the rooms that lay beyond the ones in which she entertained him.

“You’ll have to be patient with me,” she said. “You’ll have to let me trust you.”

“I can be patient,” he said. He had drawn her so close that the sharp crests of her pelvis pressed against him; he wanted to reach into her body and grab her by the bones. “Claire Morgenstern,” he said. “Klárika.” She would ruin him, he thought. But he could no sooner have sent her away than he could have dismissed geometry from architecture, or the cold from January, or the winter sky from outside his window. He bent to her and kissed her. Then, for the first time, he took her into his own bed.

When he stepped into the world the next morning it was a transformed place. The dullness of the weeks without her had fallen away. He had become human again, had reclaimed his own flesh and blood, and hers. Everything glittered too brilliantly in the winter sun; every detail of the street rushed at him as if he were seeing it for the first time. How had he never noticed the way light fell from the sky onto the bare limbs of the lindens outside his building, the way it broke and diffused on the wet paving stones and needled whitely from the polished brass handles of the doors along the street? He savored the bracing slap of his soles against the sidewalk, fell in love with the cascade of ice in the frozen fountain of the Luxembourg. He wanted to thank someone aloud for the fine long corridor of the boulevard Raspail, which conducted him every day along its row of Haussmann-era buildings to the blue doors of the École Spéciale. He adored the empty courtyard awash with winter sunlight, its green benches empty, its grass frozen, its paths wet with melted snow. A speckle-breasted bird on a branch pronounced her name exactly: Klara, Klara.

He ran upstairs to the studio and looked among the drawings for the new set of plans he’d been working on with Polaner. He thought he might spend a few minutes on them before he had to report to Vago for his morning French. But the plans weren’t there; Polaner must have taken them home with him. Instead he picked up the textbook of architectural vocabulary he would study that morning with Vago, and ran downstairs again for a stop at the men’s room. He pushed open the door into echoing dark and fumbled for the light switch. From the far corner of the room came a low wheezing groan.

Andras turned on the light. On the concrete floor, against the wall beyond the urinals and the sinks, someone was curled into a tight G. A small form, a man’s, in a velvet jacket. Beside him a set of plans, crumpled and boot-stomped.

“Polaner?”

That sound again. A wheeze sliding into a groan. And then his own name.

Andras went to him and knelt beside him on the concrete. Polaner wouldn’t look at Andras, or couldn’t. His face was dark with bruises, his nose broken, his eyes hidden in purple folds. He kept his knees tight against his chest.

“My God,” Andras said. “What happened? Who did this?”

No response.

“Don’t move,” Andras said, and staggered to his feet. He turned and ran out of the room, across the courtyard, and up the stairs to Vago’s office, and opened the door without knocking.

“Lévi, what on earth?”

“Eli Polaner’s been beaten half to death. He’s in the men’s room, ground floor.”

They ran downstairs. Vago tried to get Polaner to let him see what had happened, but Polaner wouldn’t uncurl. Andras pleaded with him. When Polaner dropped his arms from his face, Vago took a sharp breath. Polaner started to cry. One of his lower teeth had been knocked out, and he spat blood onto the concrete.

“Stay here, both of you,” Vago said. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”

“No,” Polaner said. “No ambulance.” But Vago had already gone, the door slamming behind him as he ran into the courtyard.

Polaner rolled onto his back, letting his arms go limp. Beneath the velvet jacket his shirt had been torn open, and something had been written on his chest in black ink.

Feygele. A Jewish fag.

Andras touched the torn shirt, the word. Polaner flinched.

“Who did it?” Andras said.

“Lemarque,” Polaner said. Then he mumbled something else, a phrase Andras could only hear halfway, and couldn’t translate: “J’étais coin…”

“Tu étais quoi?”

“J’étais coincé,” Polaner said, and repeated it until Andras could understand. They’d caught him in a trap. Tricked him. In a whisper: “Asked me to meet him here last night. And then came with three others.”

“Meet him here at night?” Andras said. “To work on those plans?”

“No.” Polaner turned his blackened and swollen eyes on him. “Not to work.”

Feygele.

It took him a moment to understand. Meet at night: an assignation. So this, and not the girl back in Poland, the would-be fiancée who had written him those letters, was what had prevented him from showing interest in women here in Paris.

“Oh, God,” Andras said. “I’ll kill him. I’ll knock his teeth down his throat.”

Vago came through the door of the men’s room with a first-aid box. A cluster of students crowded into the doorway behind him. “Go away,” he shouted back over his shoulder, but the students didn’t move. Vago’s brows came together into a tight V. “Now!” he cried, and the students backed away, murmuring to each other. The door slammed. Vago knelt on the floor beside Andras and put a hand on Polaner’s shoulder.

“An ambulance is coming,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”

Polaner coughed, spat blood. He tried to hold his shirt closed with one hand, but the effort was beyond him; his arm fell against the concrete floor.

“Tell him,” Andras said.

“Tell me what?” said Vago.

“Who did this.”

“Another student?” Vago said. “We’ll bring him before the disciplinary council. He’ll be expelled. We’ll press criminal charges.”

“No, no,” Polaner said. “If my parents knew-”

Now Vago saw the word inked across Polaner’s chest. He rocked back onto his heels and put a hand to his mouth. For a long time he didn’t speak or move. “All right,” he said, finally. “All right.” He moved the shreds of Polaner’s shirt aside to get a better look at his injuries; Polaner’s chest and abdomen were black with bruises. Andras could hardly bear to look. Nausea plowed through him, and he had to put his head against one of the porcelain sinks. Vago pulled off his own jacket and draped it over Polaner’s chest. “All right,” he said. “You’ll go to the hospital and they’ll take care of you. We’ll worry about the rest of this later.”

“Our plans,” Polaner said, touching the crumpled sheets of drafting paper.

“Don’t think about that,” Vago said. “We’ll fix them.” He picked up the plans and handed them carefully to Andras, as though there were any chance they could be salvaged. Then, hearing the ambulance bell outside, he ran to direct the attendants to the men’s room. Two men in white uniforms brought a stretcher in; when they lifted Polaner onto it, he fainted from the pain. Andras held the door open as they carried him into the courtyard. A crowd had gathered outside. The word had spread as the students arrived for morning classes. The attendants had to push their way through the crowd as they carried Polaner down the flagstone path.

“There’s nothing to see,” Vago shouted. “Go to your classes.” But there were no classes yet; it was only a quarter to eight. Not a single person turned away until the attendants had gotten Polaner into the ambulance. Andras stood at the courtyard door, holding Polaner’s plans like the broken body of an animal. Vago put a hand on his shoulder.

“Come to my office,” he said.

Andras turned to follow him. He knew this was the same courtyard he’d crossed earlier that morning, with the same frosted grass and green benches, the same paths bright-wet in the sun. He knew it, but now he couldn’t see what he had seen before. It astonished him to think the world could trade that beauty for this ugliness, all in the space of a quarter hour.

In his office, Vago told Andras about the other cases. Last February someone had stenciled the German words for filth and swine onto the final projects of a group of Jewish fifth-year students, and later that spring a student from Côte d’Ivoire had been dragged from the studio at night and beaten in the cemetery behind the school. That student, too, had had an insult painted on his chest, a racial slur. But not one of the perpetrators had been identified. If Andras had any information to volunteer, he would be helping everyone.

Andras hesitated. He sat on his usual stool, rubbing his father’s pocket watch with his thumb. “What will happen if they’re caught?”

“They’ll be questioned. We’ll take disciplinary and legal action.”

“And then their friends will do something worse. They’ll know Polaner told.”

“And if we do nothing?” Vago said.

Andras let the watch drop into the hollow of his pocket. He considered what his father would tell him to do in a situation like this. He considered what Tibor would tell him to do. There was no question: They would both think him a coward for hesitating.

“Polaner mentioned Lemarque,” he said. It came out as a whisper at first, and he repeated the name, louder. “Lemarque and some others. I don’t know who else.”

“Fernand Lemarque?”

“That’s what Polaner said.” And he told Vago everything he knew.

“All right,” said Vago. “I’m going to talk to Perret. In the meantime”-he opened his architectural vocabulary book to the page that depicted the inner structures of roofs, with their vertical poinçons, their buttressing contre-fiches, their riblike arbalétriers-“stay here and study,” he said, and left Andras alone in the office.

Andras couldn’t study, of course; he couldn’t keep the image of Polaner from his mind. Again and again he saw Polaner on the floor, the word inscribed on his chest in black ink, the plans crumpled beside him. Andras understood desperation and loneliness; he knew how it felt to be thousands of miles from home; he knew how it felt to carry a secret. But to what depths of misery would Polaner have had to descend in order to imagine Lemarque as a lover? As a person with whom he might share a moment of intimacy in the men’s room at night?

Not five minutes passed before Rosen burst into Vago’s office, cap in hand. Ben Yakov stood behind him, abashed, as though he’d tried and failed to prevent Rosen from tearing upstairs.

“Where’s that little bastard?” Rosen shouted. “Where is that weasel? If they’re hiding him up here, I swear to God I’ll kill them all!”

Vago ran down the hall from Perret’s office. “Lower your voice,” he said. “This isn’t a beer hall. Where’s who?”

“You know who,” Rosen said. “Fernand Lemarque. He’s the one who whispers sale Juif. The one who put up those posters for that Front de la Jeunesse. You saw them: Meet and Unite, Youth of France, and all that rubbish, at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes, of all places. They’re anti-parliament, anti-Semitic, anti-everything. He’s one of their little stooges. There’s a whole group of them. Third-years, fifth-years. From here, from the Beaux-Arts, from other schools all over the city. I know. I’ve been to their meetings. I’ve heard what they want to do to us.”

“All right,” Vago said. “Suppose you tell me about it after studio.”

“After studio!” Rosen spat on the floor. “Right now! I want the police.”

“We’ve already contacted the police.”

“Bullshit! You haven’t called anyone. You don’t want a scandal.”

Now Perret himself came down the hall, his gray cape rolling behind him. “Enough,” he said. “We’re handling this. Go to your studio.”

“I won’t,” Rosen said. “I’m going to find that little bastard myself.”

“Young man,” Perret said. “There are elements of this situation that you don’t understand. You’re not a cowboy. This is not the Wild West. This country has a system of justice, which we’ve already put into play. If you don’t lower your voice and conduct yourself like a gentleman, I’m going to have you removed from this school.”

Rosen turned and went down the stairs, cursing under his breath. Andras and Ben Yakov followed him to the studio, where Vago met them ten minutes later. At nine o’clock they continued with the previous day’s lesson, as if designing the perfect maison particulier were the only thing that mattered in the world.

At the hospital that afternoon, Andras and Rosen and Ben Yakov found Polaner in a long narrow ward filled with winter light. He lay in a high bed, his legs propped on pillows, his nose set with a plaster bridge, deep purple bruises ringing his eyes. Three broken ribs. A broken nose. Extensive contusions on the upper body and legs. Signs of internal bleeding-abdominal swelling, unstable pulse and temperature, blood pooling beneath the skin. Symptoms of shock. Aftereffects of hypothermia. That was what the doctor told them. A chart at the foot of Polaner’s bed showed temperature and pulse and blood-pressure readings taken every quarter hour. As they crowded around the bed, he opened his swollen eyes, called them by unfamiliar Polish names, and lost consciousness. A nurse came down the ward with two hot-water bottles, which she tucked beneath Polaner’s sheets. She took his pulse and blood pressure and temperature and recorded the numbers on his chart.

“How is he?” Rosen asked, getting to his feet.

“We don’t know yet,” the nurse said.

“Don’t know? Is this a hospital? Are you a nurse? Isn’t it your job to know?”

“All right, Rosen,” Ben Yakov said. “It’s not her fault.”

“I want to speak to that doctor again,” Rosen said.

“I’m afraid he’s making his rounds at the moment.”

“For God’s sake! This is our friend. I just want to know exactly how bad it is.”

“I wish I could tell you myself,” the nurse said.

Rosen sat down again and put his head in his hands. He waited until the nurse had gone off down the ward. “I swear to God,” he said. “I swear to God, if I catch those bastards! I don’t care what happens to me. I don’t care if I do get kicked out of school. I’ll go to jail if I have to. I want to make them regret they were born.” He looked up at Andras and Ben Yakov. “You’ll help me find them, won’t you?”

“Why?” Ben Yakov said. “So we can bash their skulls in?”

“Oh, pardon me,” Rosen said. “I suppose you wouldn’t want to risk having your own pretty nose broken.”

Ben Yakov got up from his chair and took Rosen by the shirtfront. “You think I like seeing him like this?” he said. “You think I don’t want to kill them myself?”

Rosen twisted his shirt out of Ben Yakov’s grasp. “This isn’t just about him. The people who did this to him would do it to us.” He took up his coat and slung it over his arm. “I don’t care if you come with me or not. I’m going to look for them, and when I find them they’re going to answer for what they did.” He jammed his cap onto his head and went off down the ward.

Ben Yakov put a hand to the back of his neck and stood looking at Polaner. Then he sighed and sat down again beside Andras. “Look at him. God, why did he have to meet Lemarque at night? What was he thinking? He can’t be-what they said.”

Andras watched Polaner’s chest rise and fall, a faint disturbance beneath the sheets. “And what if he were?” he said.

Ben Yakov shook his head. “Do you believe it?”

“It’s not impossible.”

Ben Yakov set his chin on his fist and stared at the railing of the bed. He had ceased for the moment to resemble Pierre Fresnay. His eyes were hooded and damp, his mouth drawn into a crumpled line. “There was one time,” he said, slowly. “One day when we were going to meet you and Rosen at the café, he said something about Lemarque. He said he thought Lemarque wasn’t really an anti-Semite-that he hated himself, not Jews. That he had to put on a show so people wouldn’t see him for what he was.”

“What did you say?”

“I said Lemarque could go stuff himself.”

“That’s what I would have said.”

“No,” Ben Yakov said. “You would have listened. You’d have had something intelligent to say in return. You would have asked what made him think so.”

“He’s a private person,” Andras said. “He might not have said more if you’d asked.”

“But I knew something was wrong. You must have noticed it too. You were working on that project with him. Anyone could tell he hadn’t been sleeping, and he was so quiet when Lemarque was around-quieter than usual.”

Andras didn’t know what to say. He’d been consumed with thoughts of Klara, with his anticipation of Tibor’s visit, with his own work. He was aware of Polaner as a constant presence in his life, knew him to be guarded and circumspect, even knew him to brood at times; but he hadn’t considered that Polaner might possess private woes as monumental as his own. If the affair with Klara had been difficult, how much harder might it have been for Polaner to nurse a secret attraction to Lemarque? He had spent little time imagining what it might be like to be a man who favored men. There were plenty of girlish men and boyish women in Paris, of course, and everyone knew the famous clubs and balls where they went to meet: Magic-City, the Monocle, the Bal de la Montagne-Sainte -Geneviève; but that world seemed remote from Andras’s life. What hint of it had there been in his own experience? Things had gone on at gimnázium-boys cultivated friendships that seemed romantic in their intrigues and betrayals; and then there were those times when he and his classmates would stand in a row, their shorts around their ankles, bringing themselves off together in the semidark. There was one boy at school whom everyone said loved boys-Willi Mandl, a lanky blond boy who played piano, wore white embroidered socks, and had been glimpsed one afternoon in a secondhand store dreamily fondling a blue silk reticule. But that was all part of the fog of childhood, nothing that seemed to bear upon his current life.

Now Polaner opened his eyes and looked at Andras. Andras touched Ben Yakov’s sleeve. “Polaner,” Andras said. “Can you hear me?”

“Are they here?” Polaner said, almost unintelligibly.

“We’re here,” Andras said. “Go to sleep. We’re not going to leave you.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Visitor

ANDRAS HADN’T BEEN back to the Gare du Nord since he’d arrived from Budapest in September. Now, in late January, as he stood on the platform waiting for Tibor’s train, it amazed him to consider the bulk of ignorance he’d hauled to Paris those few months ago. He’d known almost nothing about architecture. Nothing about the city. Less than nothing about love. He had never touched a woman’s naked body. Hadn’t known French. Those SORTIE signs above the exits might as well have said YOU IDIOT! The past days’ events had only served to remind him how little he still knew of the world. He felt he was just beginning to sense the scope of his own inexperience, his own benightedness; he had scarcely begun to allay it. He’d hoped that by the time he saw his brother again he might feel more like a man, like someone conversant with the wider world. But there was nothing more he could do about that now. Tibor would have to take him as he was.

At a quarter past five the Western Europe Express pulled into the station, filling that glass-and-iron cavern with the screech of brakes. Porters lowered the steps and climbed down; passengers poured forth, men and women haggard from traveling all night. Young men his age, sleepless and uncertain-looking in the wintry light of the station, squinted at the signs and searched for their baggage. Andras scanned the faces of the passengers. As more and more of them passed without a sign of Tibor, he had a moment of fear that his brother had decided not to come after all. And then someone put a hand on his shoulder, and he turned, and there was Tibor Lévi on the platform of the Gare du Nord.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Tibor said, and pulled Andras close.

A carbonated joy rose up in Andras’s chest, a dreamlike sense of relief. He held his brother at arm’s length. Tibor scrutinized Andras from head to toe, his gaze coming to rest on Andras’s hole-ridden shoes.

“It’s a good thing you have a brother who’s a shoe clerk,” he said. “Or was one. Those filthy oxfords wouldn’t have lasted you another week.”

They retrieved Tibor’s bags and took a cab to the Latin Quarter, a trip Andras found surprisingly brief and direct, and he grasped how pro-foundry his first Parisian cab driver had cheated him. The streets flashed past almost too quickly; he wanted to show Tibor everything at once. They flew down the boulevard de Sébastopol and over the Île de la Cité, and were turning onto the rue des Écoles in what felt like an instant. The Latin Quarter crouched beneath a haze of rain, its sidewalks crowded with umbrellas. They rushed Tibor’s bags through the drizzle and dragged them upstairs. When they reached Andras’s garret, Tibor stood in the doorway and laughed.

“What?” Andras said. He was proud of his shabby room.

“It’s exactly as I imagined,” Tibor said. “Down to the last detail.”

Under his gaze the Paris apartment seemed to come fully into Andras’s possession perhaps for the first time, as if his seeing it made it continuous with the places Andras had lived before, with the life he had led before he climbed onto a train at Nyugati Station in September. “Come in,” Andras said. “Take off your coat. Let me make a fire.”

Tibor took off his coat, but he wouldn’t let Andras make the fire. It couldn’t have mattered less that this was Andras’s apartment, nor that Tibor had been traveling for three days. This was how it had always been between them: The older took care of the younger. If this had been Mátyás’s apartment and Andras had been there to visit, Andras would have been the one cracking the kindling and piling the paper beneath the logs. In a few minutes Tibor had conjured a steady blaze. Only then would he take off his shoes and crawl into Andras’s bed.

“What a relief!” he said. “It’s been three days since I slept lying down.” He pulled the coverlet over himself and in another moment he was asleep.

Andras set up his books on the table and tried to study, but found he couldn’t concentrate. He wanted news of Mátyás and his parents. And he wanted news of Budapest -not of its politics or its problems, which anyone could read about in the Hungarian dailies, but of the neighborhood where they’d lived, the people they knew, the innumerable small changes that marked the flow of time. He wanted, too, to tell Tibor what had happened to Polaner, whom he’d seen again that morning. Polaner had looked even worse than before, swollen and livid and feverish. His breath had grated in his throat, and the nurses had bent over him with dressings for his bruises and doses of fluids to raise his blood pressure. A team of doctors gathered at the foot of his bed and debated the risks and benefits of surgery. The signs of internal bleeding persisted, but the doctors couldn’t agree whether it was best to operate or whether the bleeding would stop on its own. Andras tried to decode their quick medical patter, tried to piece through the puzzle of French anatomical terms, but he couldn’t grasp everything, and his fear prevented him from asking questions. It was horrible to think of Polaner cut open, and even worse to think of the bleeding unstinted inside him. Andras had stayed until Professor Vago arrived to take over the watch; he didn’t want Polaner to wake and find himself alone. Ben Yakov hadn’t made an appearance that morning, and no one had heard from Rosen since he’d left the hospital in search of Lemarque.

Now he forced himself to look at his textbook: a list of statics problems swarming in an antlike blur. He willed the numbers and letters into an intelligible order, penciled neat columns of figures onto a clean sheet of graph paper. He calculated the force vectors acting upon fifty steel rods in a load-bearing wall of reinforced concrete, located the points of highest tension along a cathedral buttress, estimated the wind sway of a hypothetical steel structure twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Each building with its quiet internal math, the numbers floating within the structures. An hour passed as he made his way through the list of problems. At last Tibor groaned and sat up in bed.

“Orrh,” he said. “Am I still in Paris?”

“I’m afraid so,” Andras said.

Tibor insisted on taking Andras to dinner. They went to a Basque restaurant that was supposed to serve good oxtail soup. The waiter was a broad-shouldered bully who banged the plates onto the tables and shouted curses at the kitchen. The soup was thin, the meat overcooked, but they drank Basque beer that made Andras feel flushed and sentimental. Here was his brother at last, here they were together, dining in a foreign city like the grown men they’d become. Their mother would have laughed aloud to see them together in this mannish restaurant, leaning over their mugs of ale.

“Be honest,” Andras said. “How’s Anya? Her letters are too cheerful. I’m afraid she wouldn’t tell me if something were wrong.”

“I went to Konyár the weekend before I left,” Tibor said. “Mátyás was there, too. Anya’s trying to convince Apa to move to Debrecen for the winter. She wants him close to a good doctor if he gets pneumonia again. He won’t go, of course. He insists he won’t get sick, as though he had any control over that. And when I take Anya’s side, he asks me who I think I am to tell him what to do. You’re not a doctor yet, Tibi, he says. And he shakes his finger at me.”

Andras laughed, though he knew it was a serious matter; they both knew how ill their father had been, and how their mother relied on him. “What will they do?”

“Stay in Konyár, for now.”

“And Mátyás?”

Tibor shook his head. “A strange thing happened the night before I left. Matyás and I went walking out to the rail bridge above that creek, the one where we used to catch minnows in the summer.”

“I know the one,” Andras said.

“It was a cold night to be out walking. The bridge was icy. We never should have been up there in the first place. Well, we stood there for a while looking at the stars, and we started talking about Anya and Apa, about what Mátyás might have to do if something happened to them, and he was angry at me, you know-I was leaving him to handle everything alone, he said. I tried to tell him they’d be fine, and that if anything truly bad happened, you and I would come home, and he said we’d never come home, that you were gone for good and that I would be soon. We were having this argument above that frozen creek, and then we heard a train coming.”

“I don’t know if I want to hear the end of this.”

“So Mátyás says, ‘Stay on the bridge. Stand here beside the tracks, on the crossties. See if we can keep our balance when the train comes by. Think you can? Not scared, are you?’ The train’s coming fast now. And you know that bridge, Andras. The ties give you about a meter on each side of the tracks. And it’s maybe twenty meters above the creek. So he jumps onto the ties between the rails and stands there facing the train. It’s coming on. The light from the headlamp’s already on him. I’m shouting at him to get off, but he’s not going anywhere. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he says. ‘Let it come.’ So I run at him and put him over my shoulder like a sack of sawdust, and I swear to God, the bridge was iced so badly I nearly fell and killed us both. I got him off and threw him in the snow. The train came by about a second later. He stood up laughing like a madman afterward, and I got up and hit him across the jaw. I wanted to break his neck, the little idiot.”

“I would have broken his neck!”

“Believe me, I wanted to.”

“He didn’t want you to go. He’s all alone there now.”

“Not exactly,” Tibor said. “He’s got quite a life in Debrecen. Nothing like our school days. He and I made it up the next day, and I went back there with him on the way to Budapest. You should see what he’s been doing at that nightclub where he performs! He ought to be in movies. He’s like Fred Astaire, but with back handsprings and somersaults. And they pay him to do it! I might be happy for him if I didn’t think he’s completely lost his mind. He’s inches from being kicked out of school, you know. He’s failing Latin and history and barely sliding by in his other classes. I’m sure he’ll quit as soon as he saves enough for a ticket out of Hungary. Anya and Apa know it, too.”

“You didn’t tell them about that bridge business, did you?”

“Are you joking?”

They signaled to the waiter for another round of drinks. While they waited, Andras asked about Budapest and their old Harsfa utca and the Jewish Quarter.

“It’s all much the same as when you left,” Tibor said. “Though everyone’s increasingly worried that Hitler’s going to drag Europe into another war.”

“If he does, the Jews will get the blame. Here in France, at least.”

The waiter returned, and Tibor took a long, thoughtful drink of Basque beer. “Not as much fraternité or égalité as you once thought, is there?”

Andras told him about the meeting of Le Grand Occident, and then about what had happened to Polaner. Tibor took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with his handkerchief, and put them on again.

“I was talking to a man on the train who’d just been in Munich,” he said. “A Hungarian journalist sent to report on a rally there. He saw three men beaten to death for destroying copies of a state-sponsored anti-Jewish newspaper. Insurgents, the German press called them. One of them was a decorated officer from the Great War.”

Andras sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “With Polaner the situation’s personal,” he said. “There are questions about his relationship with one of the men who did it.”

“It’s just the same brand of hatred writ small,” Tibor said. “Horrible any way you look at it.”

“I was a fool to think things would be different here.”

“ Europe ’s changing,” Tibor said. “The picture’s getting bleaker everywhere. But it hasn’t all been grim for you here, I hope.”

“It hasn’t.” He looked up at Tibor and managed a smile.

“What’s that about, Andráska?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you harboring secrets? Have you got some intrigue going on?”

“You’ll have to buy me a stronger drink,” Andras said.

At a nearby bar they ordered whiskey, and he told Tibor everything: about the invitation to the Morgensterns’, and how he’d recognized the name and address from the letter; how he’d fallen in love with Klara, not Elisabet; how they’d failed to keep the attraction at bay. How Klara had told him nothing about what had brought her to Paris, or why her identity had to be kept a secret. When he’d finished, Tibor held on to his glass and stared.

“How much older is she?”

There was no way around it. “Nine years.”

“Good God,” Tibor said. “You’re in love with a grown woman. This is serious, Andras, do you understand?”

“Serious as death.”

“Put down that glass. I’m talking to you.”

“I’m listening.”

“She’s thirty-one,” Tibor said. “She’s not a girl. What are your intentions?”

A tightness gathered in Andras’s throat. “I want to marry her,” he said.

“Of course. And you’ll live on what?”

“Believe me, I’ve thought about that.”

“Four and a half more years,” Tibor said. “That’s how long it’ll take you to get your degree. She’ll be thirty-six. When you’re her age, she’ll be nearly forty. And when you’re forty, she’ll be-”

“Stop it,” Andras said. “I can do the math.”

“But have you?”

“So what? So what if she’s forty-nine when I’m forty?”

“What happens when you’re forty and a thirty-year-old woman starts paying attention to you? Do you think you’ll stay faithful to your wife?”

“Tibi, do you have to do this?”

“What about the daughter? Does she know what’s going on between you and her mother?”

Andras shook his head. “Elisabet detests me, and she’s terrible to Klara. I doubt she’d take kindly to the situation.”

“And József Hász? Does he know you’ve fallen in love with his aunt?”

“No. He doesn’t know his aunt’s whereabouts. The family doesn’t trust him with the information, whatever that means.”

Tibor laced his fingers. “Good God, Andras, I don’t envy you.”

“I was hoping you’d tell me what to do.”

“I know what I’d do. I’d break it off as soon as I could.”

“You haven’t even met her.”

“What difference would that make?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you might want to. Aren’t you even curious?”

“Desperately,” he said. “But I won’t participate in your undoing. Not even as a spectator.” And he called the waiter over and requested the bill, then firmly changed the subject.

In the morning Andras brought Tibor to the École Spéciale, where they met Vago at his office. When they entered, Vago was sitting behind his desk and talking on the telephone in his particular manner: He held the mouthpiece between his cheek and shoulder and gesticulated with both hands. He sketched the shape of a flawed building in the air, then erased it with a sweep of his arm, then sketched another building, this one with a roof that seemed flat but was not flat, to allow for drainage-and then the conversation was over, and Andras introduced Tibor to Vago at last, there in the room where he had been the subject of so many morning conversations, as though the talking itself had caused Tibor to materialize.

“Off to Modena,” Vago said. “I envy you. You’ll love Italy. You won’t ever want to go back to Budapest.”

“I’m grateful for your help,” Tibor said. “If I can ever repay the favor…”

Vago waved the idea away. “You’ll become a doctor,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I won’t need your favors.” Then he gave them the news from the hospital: Polaner was holding steady; the doctors had decided not to operate yet. Of Lemarque there was still no sign. Rosen had kicked down the door of his rooming house the day before, but he was nowhere to be found.

Tibor sat through the morning classes with Andras. He heard Andras present his solution to the statics problem about the cathedral buttress, and he let Andras show him his drawings in studio. He met Ben Yakov and Rosen, who quickly exhausted the few words of Hungarian they’d learned from Andras; Tibor bantered with them in his sparse but fearless French. At noon, over lunch at the school café, Rosen talked about his trip to Lemarque’s rooming house. He looked depleted now; his face had lost its angry flush, and his russet-colored freckles seemed to float on the surface of his skin. “What a rathole,” he said. “A hundred cramped dark rooms full of smelly men. It stank worse than a prison. You could almost feel sorry for the bastard, living in a place like that.” He paused to give a broad yawn. He’d been up all night at the hospital.

“And nothing?” Ben Yakov said. “Not a trace of him?”

Rosen shook his head. “I searched the place from basement to attic. Nobody had seen him, or at least they claimed they hadn’t.”

“And what if you’d found him?” Tibor asked.

“What would I have done, you mean? At the time, I would have choked him to death with my bare hands. But I would have been a fool to do it. We need to know who his accomplices were.”

The student café began to clear. Doors opened and slammed all around the atrium as students filtered into the classrooms. Tibor watched them go, his eyes grave behind his silver-rimmed glasses.

“What are you thinking about?” Andras asked him in Hungarian.

“Lucky Béla,” Tibor said. “Ember embernek farkasa.”

“Speak French, Hungarians,” Rosen said. “What are you talking about?”

“Something our father used to say,” Andras said, and repeated the phrase.

“And what does that mean, in the parlance of the rest of the world?”

“Man is a wolf to man.”

That night they were supposed to go to a party at József Hász’s on the boulevard Saint-Jacques. It was to be the first time Andras would spend an evening at József’s since the beginning of his liaison with Klara. The idea made him anxious, but József had invited him in person a week earlier; a few of his paintings were to appear in a student show at the Beaux-Arts, which Andras must be sure to miss because it would be a terrible bore, but after the opening there would be drinks and dinner at József’s. Andras had demurred on the basis that Tibor would be in town and that he couldn’t burden József with another guest, but that had only made József insist all the more: If Tibor were in Paris for the first time, he couldn’t miss a party at József Hász’s.

When they arrived, the company was already drunk. A trio of poets stood on the sofa and shouted verse in three-part cacophony while a girl in a green leotard performed acts of contortion on the Oriental rug. József himself presided over the card table, winning at poker while the other players scowled at their dwindling piles of money.

“The Hungarians have arrived!” József said when he saw them. “Now we’ll have a real game. Pull up a chair, men! Play cards.”

“I’m afraid we can’t,” Andras said. “We’re broke.”

József dealt a hand with dazzling speed. “Eat, then,” he said. “If you’re broke, you’re probably hungry. Aren’t you hungry?” He didn’t look up from his cards. “Visit the buffet.”

On the dining table was a raft of baguettes, three wheels of cheese, pickles, apples, figs, a chocolate torte, six bottles of wine.

“Now that’s a welcome sight,” Tibor said. “Free dinner.”

They made sandwiches of figs and cheese and took them to the large front room, where they watched the contortionist become a circle, a bell, a Spanish knot. Afterward she posed erotically with another girl, while a third girl took photographs with an ancient-looking camera.

Tibor watched in a mesmeric trance. “Does Hász have parties like this often?” he asked, following the girls with his eyes as they shifted to a new pose.

“More often than you’d imagine,” Andras said.

“How many people live in this apartment?”

“Just him.”

Tibor let out a low whistle.

“There’s hot water in the bathroom, too.”

“Now you’re exaggerating.”

“No, I’m not. And a porcelain tub with lion feet. Come see.” He led Tibor down the hall toward the back of the apartment and paused at the bathroom door, which stood open just enough to show a sliver of white porcelain. A glow of candles emanated from within. Andras opened the door. There, blinking against the glare from the hallway, was a couple standing against the wall, the girl’s hair disheveled, the top buttons of her shirt undone. The girl was Elisabet Morgenstern, one hand raised against the light.

“Pardon us, gentlemen,” the man said in American-accented French, each word delivered with drink-soaked languor.

Elisabet had recognized Andras at once. “Stop looking at me, you stupid Hungarian!” she said.

Andras took a step backward into the hall, pulling Tibor along with him. The man gave them a wink of drunken triumph and kicked the door closed.

“Well,” Tibor said. “I suppose we’d better examine the plumbing later.”

“That might be best.”

“And who was that darling girl? She seems to know you.”

“That darling girl was Elisabet Morgenstern.”

“The Elisabet? Klara’s daughter?”

“The.”

“And who was the man?”

“Someone awfully brave, that’s for sure.”

“Does József know Elisabet?” Tibor said. “Do you think the secret’s out between them?”

Andras shook his head. “No idea. Elisabet does seem to live her own life outside the house. But József’s never mentioned a secret cousin, which I’m certain he would have, as much as he loves to gossip.” His temples began to pound as he wondered what exactly he had discovered, and what he would tell Klara.

They wove their way back to the sofa and sat down to watch the guests play charades; a girl appropriated Andras’s coat and wore it over her head like a hood while she stooped to pick invisible flowers. The others called out the titles of films Andras had never seen. He needed another glass of wine, and was ready to get up and look for one when Elisabet’s lover staggered into the room. The man, blond and broad-shouldered and wearing an expensive-looking merino jacket, tucked his shirt into his trousers and smoothed his hair. He raised a hand in greeting and sat down on the couch between Andras and Tibor.

“How are we, gentlemen?” he asked in his languid French. “You’re not having nearly as much fun as I am, from the look of it.” He sounded like the Hollywood stars who did commercials for Radio France. “That girl’s quite a firecracker. I met her on a ski vacation over Christmas, and I’m afraid I’ve become addicted to her.”

“We were just leaving,” Andras said. “We’ll be on our way now.”

“No, sir!” the blond American crowed. He put an arm across Andras’s chest. “No one goes! We’re staying all night!”

Down the hall came Elisabet, shaking drops of water from her hands. She’d hastily rearranged her hair and misbuttoned her blouse. When she reached the front room, she beckoned to Andras with a single urgent sweep of her hand. Andras got up from the sofa and excused himself with a half bow, then followed Elisabet down the hall. She led him to József’s bedroom, where a deluge of coats had overflowed the bed and pooled on the floor.

“All right,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Nothing!” Andras said. “Not a thing.”

“If you tell my mother about Paul, I’ll kill you.”

“When would I tell her, now that you’ve banished me from your house?”

Elisabet’s look became shrewd. “Don’t play innocent with me,” she said. “I know you haven’t spent the past two months hoping I’d fall in love with you. I know what’s going on between you and my mother. I could see how she looked at you. I’m not a fool, Andras. She might not tell me everything, but I’ve known her long enough to be able to tell when she’s got a lover. And you’re just her type. Or one of her types, I should say.”

Now it was his turn to show a self-conscious flush; I could see how she looked at you. And how he must have looked at her. How could anyone have failed to see it? He glanced down at the hearth; a silver cigarette case lay among the ashes, its monogram obscured. “You know she wouldn’t want you to be here,” he said. “Does she know you know József Hász?”

“That idiot who lives here, you mean? Why, is he some sort of notorious criminal?”

“Not exactly,” Andras said. “He can throw a rather rough party, that’s all.”

“I just met him tonight. He’s some friend of Paul’s from school.”

“And you met Paul in Chamonix?”

“I don’t see where that’s any business of yours. And I mean it, Andras, you can’t tell my mother about any of this. She’ll lock me in my room for life.” She tugged at her shirt, and when she saw she’d buttoned it wrong, pronounced an unladylike curse.

“I won’t tell,” he said. “Upon my honor.”

Elisabet scowled at him, seeming to doubt his trustworthiness; but behind her hard look there was a flash of vulnerability, a consciousness that he held the key to something that mattered to her. Andras wasn’t certain whether it was Paul himself she loved, or whether it was simply the freedom to carry on a life beyond her mother’s scrutiny, but in either case he understood. He spoke his pledge again. Her tight-held shoulders relaxed a single degree, and she let out a truncated sigh. Then she fished a pair of coats from the pile on the bed, brushed past him into the hall, and returned to the front room, where Paul and Tibor were still watching the charades.

“It’s late, Paul,” Elisabet said, throwing his coat onto his lap. “Let’s go.”

“It’s early!” Paul said. “Come sit here with us and watch these girls.”

“I can’t. I have to get home.”

“Come to me, lioness,” he said, and took her wrist.

“If I have to go home alone, I will,” she said, and pulled away.

Paul got up from the sofa and kissed Elisabet on the mouth. “Stubborn girl,” he said. “I hope this gentleman wasn’t rude to you.” He gave Andras a wink.

“This gentleman has the deepest respect for the young lady,” Andras said.

Elisabet rolled her eyes. “All right,” she said. “That’s enough.” She shrugged into her coat, gave Andras a last warning look, and went to the door. Paul snapped a salute and followed her into the hallway.

“Well,” Tibor said. “I think you’d better sit down and tell me what that was all about.”

“She begged me not to tell her mother that I saw her with that man.”

“And what did you say?”

“I swore I’d never tell.”

“Not that you’d have the opportunity anyway.”

“Well,” Andras said. “It seems Elisabet has figured out what’s going on between her mother and me.”

“Ah. So the secret’s out.”

“That one is, anyway. She seemed not at all surprised. She said I was her mother’s type, whatever that means. But she doesn’t seem to have any idea that József’s her cousin.” He sighed. “Tibor, what in God’s name am I doing?”

“That’s just what I’ve been asking you,” Tibor said, and put an arm around Andras’s shoulders. A moment later József Hász appeared, three glasses of champagne in his hands. He passed them each a glass and toasted their health.

“Are you having fun?” he said. “Everyone must have fun.”

“Oh, yes,” Andras said, grateful for the champagne.

“I see you’ve met my American friend Paul,” József said. “His father’s an industrial chieftain. Automobile tires or some such thing. That new girlfriend of his is a little sharp-tongued for my taste, but he’s wild about her. Maybe he thinks that’s just the way French girls act.”

“If that’s the way French girls act, you gentlemen are in trouble,” Tibor said.

“Here’s to trouble,” József said, and they drained their glasses.

The next day Andras and Tibor walked the long halls of the Louvre, taking in the velvet-brown shadows of Rembrandt and the frivolous curlicues of Fragonard and the muscular curves of the classical marbles; then they strolled along the quais to the Pont d’Iéna and stood beneath the monumental arches of the Tower. They circumnavigated the Gare d’Orsay as Andras described how he’d built his model; finally they backtracked to the Luxembourg, where the apiary stood in silent hibernation. They sat with Polaner at the hospital as he slept through the nurses’ ministrations; Polaner, whose terrible story Andras hadn’t yet told Klara. They watched him sleep for nearly an hour. Andras wished he’d wake, wished he wouldn’t look so pale and still; the nurses said he was better that day, but Andras couldn’t see any change. Afterward they walked to the Sarah-Bernhardt, where Tibor lent a hand with the closing-down. They stowed the coffee things and folded the wooden table, cleared the actors’ pigeonholes of ancient messages, shuttled stray props to the prop room and costumes to the costume shop, where Madame Courbet was folding garments into her neatly labeled cabinets. Claudel gave Andras a half-full box of cigars-a former prop-and apologized for having told him so many times to burn in hell. He hoped Andras could forgive him, now that they’d both been cast upon the whims of fate.

Andras forgave him. “I know you didn’t mean any harm,” he said.

“That’s a good boy,” Claudel said, and kissed him on both cheeks. “He’s a good boy,” he told Tibor. “A darling.”

Monsieur Novak met them in the hallway as they were on their way out. He called them into his office, where he produced three cut-crystal glasses and poured out the last of a bottle of Tokaji. They toasted Tibor’s studies in Italy, and then they toasted the eventual reopening of the Sarah-Bernhardt and the three other theaters that were closing that week. “A city without theater is like a party without conversation,” Novak said. “No matter how good the food and drink are, people will find it dull. Aristophanes said that, I believe.”

“Thank you for keeping my brother out of the gutter,” Tibor said.

“Oh, he would have found a way without me,” Novak said, and put a hand on Andras’s shoulder.

“It was your umbrella that saved him,” Tibor said. “Otherwise he would have missed his train. And then he might have lost his nerve.”

“No, not him,” Novak said. “Not our Mr. Lévi. He would have been all right. And so will you, my young man, in Italy.” He shook Tibor’s hand and wished him luck.

It was dark by the time they left. They walked along the Quai de Gesvres as the lights of the bridges and barges shivered on the water. A wind tore through the river channel, flattening Andras’s coat against his back. He knew Klara was in her studio at that hour, teaching the final segment of her evening class. Without telling Tibor where they were going he steered them down the rue François Miron in the direction of the rue de Sévigné. He traced the route he hadn’t walked in weeks. And there on the corner, its light spilling into the street, was the dance studio with its demi-curtains, its sign that said MME. MORGENSTERN, MAÎTRESSE. The faint sound of phonograph music reached them through the glass: the slow, stately Schumann she used for the end-of-class révérences. This was a class of intermediate girls, slender ten-year-olds with downy napes, their shoulder blades like small sharp wings beneath the cotton of their leotards. At the front of the room Klara led them through a series of sweeping curtseys. Her hair was gathered into a loose roll at the base of her neck, and she wore a practice dress of plum-colored viscose, tied at the waist with a black ribbon. Her arms were supple and strong, her features tranquil. She needed no one; she had made a life, and here it was: these end-of-day révérences, her own daughter upstairs, Mrs. Apfel, the warm rooms of the flat she’d bought for herself. And yet from him, from Andras Lévi, a twenty-two-year-old student at the École Spéciale, she seemed to want something: the luxury of vulnerability, perhaps; the sharp thrill of uncertainty. As he watched, his heart seemed to go still in his chest.

“There she is,” he said. “Klara Morgenstern.”

“God,” Tibor said. “She’s beautiful, that’s for certain.”

“Let’s see if she’ll have dinner with us.”

“No, Andras. I’m not going to do it.”

“Why not?” he said. “You came here to see how I live, didn’t you? This is it. If you don’t meet her, you won’t know.”

Tibor watched as Klara lifted her arms; the children lifted their arms and swept into low curtseys.

“She’s tiny,” Tibor said. “She’s a wood nymph.”

Andras tried to see her as Tibor was seeing her-tried to see her for the first time. There was something fearless, something girlish, about the way she moved her body, as if part of her remained a child. But her eyes held the look of a woman who had seen one lifetime pass into another. That was what made her like a nymph, Andras thought: the way she seemed to embody both timelessness and the irrevocable passage of time. The music reached its end, and the girls rushed for their satchels and coats. Tibor and Andras watched them leave. Then they met Klara at the studio door, where she stood shivering in her practice dress.

“Andras,” she said, reaching for his hand. He was relieved that she seemed glad to see him; he hadn’t known how she’d react to his coming to the studio. But there was nothing wrong with his stopping in as he passed through the Marais, he told himself; it was an ordinary thing, something an acquaintance might have done.

“This is a surprise,” she said. “And who’s this gentleman?”

“This is Tibor,” Andras said. “My brother.”

Klara took his hand. “Tibor Lévi!” she said. “At last. I’ve been hearing about you for months.” She glanced over her shoulder, up the stairs. “But what are the two of you doing here? I know you haven’t come to take a lesson.”

“Have dinner with us,” Andras said.

She laughed, a little nervously. “I’m hardly dressed for it.”

“We’ll have a drink and wait for you.”

She put a hand to her mouth and glanced over her shoulder again. From the apartment came the sound of quick footsteps and the rustle of outdoor garments. “My inscrutable daughter is dining out with friends tonight.”

“Come, then,” Andras said. “We’ll keep you company.”

“All right,” she said. “Where will you be?”

Andras named a place that served bouillabaisse with slabs of thick brown bread. They both loved it; they’d been there during their ten days together in December.

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Klara said, and ran upstairs.

The restaurant had once been a smithy, and still smelled faintly of cinders and iron. The smelting ovens had been converted to cooking ovens; there were rough-hewn wooden tables, a menu full of cheap dishes, and strong apple cider served in earthenware bowls. They sat down at one of the tables and ordered drinks.

“So that was your Klara,” Tibor said, and shook his head. “She can’t be the mother of that girl we met at the party last night.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What a disaster! How did she come by that child? She must have been little more than a girl herself at the time.”

“She was fifteen,” Andras said. “I don’t know anything about the father, except that he’s long dead. She doesn’t like to talk about any of it.”

She came in just as they were ordering a second round of drinks. She hung her red hat and her coat on a hook beside the table and sat down with them, tucking a few damp strands of hair behind her ear. Andras felt the heat of her legs close to his own; he touched the folds of her dress beneath the table. She raised her eyes to him and asked if anything were wrong. He couldn’t tell her, of course, what was most immediately wrong: that Tibor objected to their liaison, at least in theory. So he told her instead what had happened to Polaner at the École Spéciale.

“What a nightmare,” she said when he’d finished, and put her forehead into her hands. “That poor boy. And what about his parents? Has someone written to them?”

“He asked us not to. He’s ashamed, you know.”

“Of course. My God.”

The three of them sat in silence, looking at their bowls of cider. When Andras glanced at Tibor it seemed to him that his brother’s look had softened; it was as though, in the shadow of what had happened to Polaner, it had become an absurdity, a luxury, to hold an opinion about the rightness or wrongness of love. Tibor asked Klara about the class she’d been teaching, and she asked what he thought of Paris and whether he’d have time to see Italy before school began.

“There won’t be much time to travel,” Tibor said. “Classes start next week.”

“And what will you study first?”

“Anatomy.”

“You’ll find it fascinating,” she said. “I did.”

“You’ve studied anatomy?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “In Budapest, as part of my ballet training. I had a master who believed in teaching the physics and mechanics of the human body. He made us read books with anatomical drawings that disgusted most of the girls-and some of the boys, too, though they tried not to show it. And one day he took us to the medical school at Budapest University, where the students were dissecting cadavers. He had one of the professors show us all the muscles and tendons and bones of the leg and the arm. Then the back, the spine. Two girls fainted, I remember. But I loved it.”

Tibor looked at her with reluctant admiration. “And do you think it improved your dancing?”

“I don’t know. I think it helps my teaching. It helps me explain things.” She became pensive for a moment, touching the stitched edge of her napkin. “You know, I have some of those anatomy books at home. More than I need or use. I should make you a gift of one of them, if you’ve got room in your luggage.”

“I couldn’t,” Tibor said, but a familiar covetousness had come into his eyes. Their father’s mania for old books had become their own; Tibor and Andras had spent hours at the used bookstores in Budapest, where Tibor had taken down one ancient anatomy book after another and showed Andras in color-plated detail the shy curve of a pancreas, the cumular cluster of a lung. He pined for those gorgeous tomes he could never afford, not even at the used booksellers’ prices.

“I insist,” Klara said. “You’ll come by after dinner and choose one.”

And so, after the bouillabaisse and another round of cider, they went to the rue de Sévigné and climbed the stairs to Klara’s apartment. Here was the sitting room where he’d seen her for the first time; here was the nest-shaped bowl with its candy eggs, the gray velvet sofa, the phonograph, the amber-shaded lamps-the intimate landscape of her life, denied him for the past month. From one of the bookshelves she extracted three large leather-bound anatomy books. She laid them on the writing desk and opened the gold-stamped covers. Tibor unfolded the leaves of illustrations to reveal the mysteries of the human body in four-color ink: the bones with their woven sheaths of muscle, the spiderweb of the lymphatic system, the coiled snake of the intestines, the small windowed room of the eye. The heaviest and most beautiful of all the volumes was a folio copy of Corpus Humanum, printed in Latin and inscribed for Klara in the bold angular script of her ballet master, Viktor Romankov: Sine scientia ars nihil est. Budapest 1920.

She took that volume from Tibor and replaced it in its leather box. “This is the one I want to give you,” she said, laying it in his arms.

He flushed and shook his head. “I couldn’t possibly.”

“I want you to have it,” she said. “For your studies.”

“I’ll be traveling. I wouldn’t want to damage it.” He held it toward her again.

“No,” she said. “Take it. You’ll be glad to have it. I’ll be glad to think of it in Modena. It’s a small thing, considering what you’ve had to do to get there.”

Tibor looked down at the book at his arms. He raised his eyes to meet Andras’s, but Andras wouldn’t look at him; he knew that if he did, this would become a matter of whether or not Tibor approved of what existed between Andras and Klara. So he kept his own gaze fixed on the fireplace screen, with its faded scene of a horse and rider in a shadowy wood, and let Tibor’s desire for that gorgeous folio make the decision for him. After another moment of hesitation, Tibor made gruff avowals of his gratitude and let Klara wrap the book in brown paper.

On Tibor’s final day in Paris, he and Andras rode the thundering Métro to Boulogne-Billancourt. The afternoon was warm for January, windless and dry. They walked the long quiet avenues, past the bakeries and greengrocers and haberdashers, out toward the neighborhood where Pingusson’s white ocean-liner building cut through the morning air as though en route to the sea. Andras told the story of the poker game wherein Perret’s loss had been transformed into a scholarship; then he led his brother farther along the rue Denfert-Rochereau, where buildings by Le Corbusier and Mallet-Stevens and Raymond Fischer and Pierre Patout stood radiating their austere, unadorned strength into the thin light of morning. In the months since his first visit here, Andras had returned again and again to this small cluster of streets where the living architects he admired most had built small-scale shrines to simplicity and beauty. One morning not long ago he had come upon Perret’s Villa Gordin, a blocklike and vaguely Japanese-looking house built for a sculptor, with a bank of reflective windows offset by two rectangles of perpendicularly laid bricks. Perret might have built anything he liked on any empty piece of land in Paris, but had chosen to do this: to create a work of Spartan simplicity, a human-sized space for an artist on a tiny street where a person could work and be alone. The building had become Andras’s favorite in Boulogne-Billancourt. They sat down on the curb across the street and he told his brother about the Latvian-born sculptor who lived there, Dora Gordin, and about the airy studio Perret had designed for her at the back of the house.

“Remember those huts you used to build in Konyár?” Tibor said. “Your housing business?”

The housing business. The summer he turned nine, just before he’d started school in Debrecen, he had become a building contractor for the neighborhood boys. He had a monopoly on scrap wood, and could build a fort or clubhouse in half a day. Four-year-old Mátyás was his assistant. Mátyás would come along on the jobs and solemnly hand nails to Andras as Andras pounded the huts together. In return for his building services, Andras collected whatever the boys had to offer: a photograph of someone’s father in a soldier’s uniform, a fleet of tiny tin warplanes, a cat’s skull, a balsa boat, a white mouse in a cage. That summer he had been the richest boy in town.

“Remember my mouse?” Andras said. “Remember what you used to call him?”

“Eliahu ha Navi.”

“Anya hated that. She thought it was sacrilegious.” He smiled and flexed his fingers against the cold curb. The shadows were lengthening, and the chill had made its way through the layers of his clothing. He was ready to suggest they keep walking, but Tibor leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the roof garden with its row of little evergreens.

“That was the year I fell in love for the first time,” he said. “I never told you. You were too young to understand, and by the time you were old enough I was in love with someone else, Zsuzsanna, that girl I used to take to dances at gimnázium. But before her there was a girl named Rózsa Geller. Rózsika. I was thirteen, she was sixteen. She was the oldest daughter of the family I boarded with in Debrecen. The ones who moved away just before you came to school.”

Andras caught an unfamiliar edge in Tibor’s voice, almost a note of bitterness. “Sixteen,” he said, and gave a low whistle. “An older woman.”

“I used to watch her bathing. She used to bathe in the kitchen in a tin washtub, and my bed was on the other side of the curtain. That curtain was full of holes. She must have known I was watching.”

“And you saw everything.”

“Everything. She would stand there pouring water over herself and humming the Marseillaise.”

“Why the Marseillaise?”

“She was in love with some French film star. He’d been in a lot of war movies.”

“Pierre Fresnay.”

“That’s right, that was the bastard’s name. How did you know?”

“That friend of mine, Ben Yakov, looks just like him.”

“Hm. I’m glad I didn’t know that when I met your friend.”

“So what happened?”

“One day her father caught me watching. He beat me bloody. Broke my arm.”

“You broke your arm playing football!”

“That was the official story. Her father said he’d turn me over to the police if I told the truth. They put me out of the house. I never saw her again.”

“Oh, God, Tibor. I never knew.”

“That was the idea.”

“It’s terrible! You were only thirteen.”

“And she was sixteen. She knew better than to let it go on. She must have known I’d get caught eventually. Maybe she wanted me to get caught.” He stood and brushed the dust from his trousers. “So you see, that’s my experience with older women.”

There was a motion behind one of the windows of the house, the shadow of a woman crossing a square of light. Andras stood up beside his brother. He imagined the sculptor coming to her window, seeing them loitering there as if they were waiting to catch a glimpse of her.

“I’m not thirteen,” Andras said. “Klara’s not sixteen.”

“No, indeed,” Tibor said. “You’re adults. Which means the consequences may be graver if you get in over your heads.”

“It’s too late,” Andras said. “I’m already in over my head. I don’t know what’ll happen. I’m at her mercy.”

“I hope she’ll show some mercy, then,” Tibor said. And he used the Yiddish word rachmones, the same word that had called Andras back to himself three months earlier at the Jardin du Luxembourg.

The next morning they carried Tibor’s bags to the Gare de Lyon, just as they’d carried Andras’s bags to Nyugati Station when he’d left for Paris. Now it was Tibor going off to an unknown life in a foreign place, Tibor going off to study and work and navigate the dark passageways of a foreign language. The wind roared through the channels of the boulevards and tried to twist the suitcases from their hands; the previous day’s warm weather was gone as though they’d only dreamed it. Paris was as gray as it had been the day Andras had arrived. He wished he had an excuse to keep Tibor with him another day, another week. Tibor was right, of course. It was a foolish thing Andras had done, getting involved with Klara Morgenstern. He’d already ventured into dangerous terrain, had found himself edging along a dwindling path toward a blind corner of rock. He didn’t have the shoes for this, nor the provisions, nor the clothing, nor the foresight, nor the mental strength, nor the experience. All he had was a kind of reckless hope-something, he imagined, not unlike the hope that had sent fifteenth-century explorers hurtling off the map. Having pointed out how ill-equipped Andras was, how could Tibor now let him go on alone? How could he step onto a train and speed off to Italy, even if medical school waited at the other end? His role had always been to show Andras the way when the way was obscure-at times, in their boyhood, quite literally, his hand was Andras’s only guide in the dark. But now they had reached the Gare de Lyon; there was the train itself, black and impassive on its tracks.

“All right, then,” Tibor said. “Off I go.”

Stay, Andras wanted to say. “Good luck,” he said.

“Write to me. And don’t get in trouble. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good. I’ll see you before long.”

Liar, Andras wanted to say.

Tibor put a hand on Andras’s sleeve. He looked as if he meant to say something more, a few final words in Hungarian before he boarded a train full of Italian- and French-speakers, but he was silent as he glanced off toward the vast mouth of the station and the tangle of tracks that lay beyond it. He stepped up onto the train and Andras handed him his leather satchel. His silver-rimmed glasses slid down the bridge of his nose; he pushed them back with his thumb.

“Write me when you get there,” Andras said.

Tibor touched his cap and disappeared into the third-class car, and was gone.

When the train had left the station, Andras went back through the SORTIE doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn’t care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs. His feet led him farther from his brother, westward across town to the boulevard Raspail, all the way to the École Spéciale, and in through the blue doors of the courtyard.

The yard was full of students, all of them strangely silent, standing in head-bowed clumps of three and four. A heavy stillness hung in the air above the yard. It had a palpable black presence, like a flock of crows frozen midflight. On a splintered bench in a corner Perret himself sat with his head in his hands.

This was what had happened: By way of the slow-moving provincial post, the news of Polaner’s injuries had reached Lemarque in Bayeux, where he’d fled to his parents’ farm after the attack. The letter, written by his accomplices, told him that Polaner lay in the hospital on the brink of death, bleeding from internal wounds: an account meant to hearten Lemarque, to show him that all had not been in vain, that the work of the beating had continued after the attack. Having received this letter, Lemarque had written two of his own. One he addressed to the directors of the school, claiming responsibility for what had happened and naming three other students, third- and fourth-year men, who had participated. The other he addressed to Polaner, a brief admission of remorse and love. Late at night, after he’d left both letters on the kitchen table, he’d hanged himself from a crossbeam in his parents’ barn. His father had discovered the body that morning, cold and blue as the hibernal dawn itself.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN. A Haircut

IT WAS DECIDED-first in a late-night meeting at Perret’s office, then later still at the Blue Dove-that Andras would be the one to break the news of Lemarque’s death to Polaner. Perret believed it was his own responsibility as director of the school, but Vago argued that the delicacy of the situation called for special measures; it might be easier, he said, if the news were to come from a friend. Andras and Rosen and Ben Yakov agreed, and decided among themselves that Andras should be the one to give Polaner the letter. They would wait, of course, until the doctors considered him to be out of danger; there was reason to think that time might come soon. After a second week in the hospital the symptoms and aftereffects of internal bleeding had abated. Polaner’s disorientation had passed, his bruising and swelling had receded; he could eat and drink again on his own. He would be in a weakened state for nearly a month, the doctors said, while he remade the blood that had been lost, but all agreed that he had moved back from the brink. That weekend, in fact, he appeared so well recovered that Andras dared to approach one of his doctors and explain in careful French about Lemarque. The doctor, a long-faced internist who had made Polaner’s case his special project, expressed concern about the possible effects of the shock; but because the news could not be kept from Polaner forever, the doctor agreed that it might be better to tell him while he was still in the hospital and could be closely watched.

The next day, as Andras sat in the now-familiar steel chair beside the bed, he introduced the subject of the École Spéciale for the first time since the attack. Now that Polaner was mending so well, Andras said, the doctor thought he might consider a gradual return to his schoolwork. Could Andras bring him anything from the studio-his statics texts, his drawing tools, a sketchbook?

Polaner gave Andras a look of pity and closed his eyes. “I’m not going back to school,” he said. “I’m going home to Kraków.”

Andras laid a hand on his arm. “Is that what you want?”

Polaner let out a long breath. “It’s been decided for me,” he said. “They decided it.”

“Nothing’s been decided. You’ll go back to school if you want.”

“I can’t,” Polaner said, his eyes filling with tears. “How can I face Lemarque, or any of them? I can’t go to studio and sit down at my table as if nothing happened.”

There was no use waiting any longer; Andras took the letter from his pocket and put it into Polaner’s hands. Polaner spent a long moment looking at the envelope, at his name written in Lemarque’s sharp-edged print. Then he opened the letter and flattened the single sheet against his leg. He read the six lines in which Lemarque confessed himself and begged Polaner’s pardon, both for the attack and for what he felt he must do. When he’d finished reading, he folded the note again and lay back against the pillow, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling beneath the sheet.

“Oh, God,” he said in a half whisper. “It’s as though I killed him myself.”

Before that moment Andras had believed that his hate for Lemarque had reached its limit, that with Lemarque’s death his feelings had moved past hate toward something more like pity. But as he watched Polaner grieve, as he watched the familiar lines and planes of his friend’s face crumple under the burden of the news, he found himself shaking with anger. How much worse that Lemarque’s death had come with this confession of remorse and love! Now Polaner would always have to consider what had been lost, what might have been if the world had been a different place. Here was a cruelty beyond the attack and the death itself, a sting like that of certain fire nettles that grew on the Hajdú plain: Once the spine was in, it would work its way deeper into the wound and discharge its poison there for days, for weeks, while the victim burned.

He stayed with Polaner that night long past dark, ignoring the ward nurse’s reminder that visiting hours were over. When she insisted, he told her she would have to call the police to get rid of him; eventually the long-faced doctor interceded on Andras’s behalf, and he was allowed to stay all night and into the next morning. As he kept watch beside the bed, his mind kept returning to what Polaner had said at the Blue Dove in October: I just want to keep my head down. I want to study and get my degree. If it were in his power, he thought, he would not let Polaner’s shame and grief send him home to Kraków.

Another week passed before Polaner left the hospital. When he did, it was Andras who brought him home to his room on the boulevard Saint-Germain. He watched over Polaner’s injuries, kept him fed, took his clothes to the laundry, built up the fire in the grate when it burned low. One morning he returned from the bakery to find Polaner sitting up in bed with a drawing tablet angled against his knees; the coverlet was snowed with pencil shavings, the chair beside the bed strewn with charcoals. Andras said not a word as he deposited a pair of baguettes on the table. He prepared bread and jam and tea for Polaner and gave it to him in bed, then took a seat at Polaner’s table. And all morning the noise of Polaner’s pencil followed him through his own work like music.

Later that morning, Polaner stood before the mirror at the bureau and ran his hands over his stubble-shadowed chin. “I look like a criminal,” he said. “I look like I’ve been in jail for months.”

“You look a good deal better than you did a few weeks ago.”

“It seems absurd to think about a haircut,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“What’s absurd about it?”

“I don’t know. Everything. To begin with, I don’t know if I can sit in a barber’s chair and carry on a barbershop conversation.”

Andras stood beside Polaner at the mirror, regarding him in the glass. He himself looked neater than he had in weeks; Klara had given him a trim the night before, and had made him look something like a gentleman, though she liked his hair long.

“Look,” Andras said. “Suppose I were to ask a friend to come and cut your hair. Then you wouldn’t have to sit in a barber’s chair and trade stories with the barber.”

“What friend?” Polaner said, regarding Andras in the glass.

“A rather close friend.”

Polaner turned from the mirror to look at Andras directly. “A lady friend?”

“Exactement.”

“What lady friend, Andras? What’s been going on while I’ve been lying in bed?”

“I’m afraid this has been going on quite a while longer than that. Months, actually.”

Polaner gave Andras a fleet, shy smile; for that moment, and for the first time since the news of Lemarque’s death, he seemed to have slipped back into his own skin. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me all about it.”

“Now that I’ve mentioned it, I consider myself under an obligation.”

Polaner gestured toward a chair. “Tell,” he said.

…

The next night found Polaner seated on that same chair in the middle of the room, his shoulders draped in a tea towel, the mirror propped before him, while Klara Morgenstern ministered to him with scissors and comb and talked to him in her low hypnotic way. When Andras had spoken to her the night before, she had understood at once why she must do what he asked; she had cancelled her dinner plans to do it. Earlier that evening, on their way to Polaner’s, she’d held Andras’s hand with a kind of mute fervor as they crossed the Seine, her eyes downcast with what Andras imagined to be the memory of a similar grief. Now he stood near the fire and watched the locks of hair fall, silent with gratitude to this woman who understood the need to do this simple and intimate thing, to perform this act of restoration in an attic apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN. In the Tuileries

THAT SPRING, when he was not in class or tending Polaner or seeing Klara, Andras learned the design and construction of stage sets under the tutelage of Vincent Forestier. Monsieur Forestier had a studio on the rue des Gravilliers where he drafted designs and built his models; for months he had been desperately in need of a new apprentice to assist with the copying of plans, the detailed and painstaking work of model construction. Forestier was tall and heavy and mournful, with a perpetual haze of gray stubble and a habit of punctuating his utterances with shrugs of his broad shoulders, as if he himself didn’t set much store by what he was saying. It turned out that he was also a quiet genius of design. With the strictest of financial constraints and the shortest of production times, he could produce palaces and city streets and shady glens in his own incomparable style. His stage sets often metamorphosed into one another: A fairy queen’s bower might become a commandant’s office in another theater on the other side of town, and then might serve a third tour of duty as a train compartment or a hermit’s hut or a pasha’s veil-draped bed. Andras’s idea of making flats with interiors on one side and exteriors on the other was one of Forestier’s lesser tricks. He made stage sets like puzzles, stage sets that could become three or four different interiors depending upon the order in which their panels were arranged; he was a master of optical illusion. He could make an actor seem to grow or shrink as he walked across a stage, could use a subtle shift of lighting to turn a nursery into a hall of horrors. Projections of hand-colored slides could suggest distant cities or mountains, ghostly presences, memories from a character’s youth. A magic lantern made to spin by the heat of a candle could send flocks of birds rippling across a scrim. Any stage set might conceal trapdoors and rotating panels; every surface hid a mysterious interior that might hide another interior that might hide still another interior that bore a haunting resemblance to the exterior. Monsieur Forestier himself had a way of appearing and disappearing as if he were an actor within a set he’d designed; he would come in and assign Andras a task, and five minutes later he would have vanished as if into a wall, leaving Andras to puzzle through the difficulties of the design alone. After the tumult of the Sarah-Bernhardt, Andras found it solitary and at times lonely work. But at night, when he came home to his room, Klara might be waiting.

He rushed home every night hoping she’d be there; most often it was her ghost he embraced in the dark, the shadow presence that remained in his room when the real Klara was absent. It nearly drove him mad when days would pass between her visits. He knew, but didn’t want to be reminded, that while he was going to school and working and taking care of Polaner, Klara was conducting her own life. She gave dinner parties, went to the cinema and the theater, to jazz clubs and gallery openings. He conjured images of the people she met at her friends’ parties or entertained at her own-choreographers and dancers from abroad, young composers, writers, actors, wealthy patrons of the arts-and felt certain that her attention would turn away from him. If for three nights she failed to appear at the rue des Écoles, he would think, Well, it’s happened, and spend the next day in a haze of despair. If he walked out alone he resented every couple he passed on the street; if he tried to distract himself with a film he cursed the jet-haired screen goddess who crept from her husband’s train compartment to climb into her lover’s moonlit couchette. If, at the end of such a night, he came home to the rue des Écoles to find a light on in his windows, he would climb the stairs telling himself she had only come to break it off for good. Then he’d open the door and find her sitting beside the fire, reading a novel or stitching the hem of a practice dress or making tea, and she would get to her feet and put her arms around his neck, and he would be ashamed he’d doubted her.

In mid-May, when the trees wore close-fitting green singlets and the breeze from the Seine was warm even at night, Klara appeared one Saturday evening in a new spring hat, a pale blue toque with a ribbon of darker blue. A new hat, that simple thing: It was nothing more than a scrap of fashion, a sign of the changing season. Surely she’d worn a variety of hats since the red bell of their first winter embraces; he could remember a camel-colored one with a black feather, and a green cap with some sort of leather tassel. But this decidedly vernal hat, this pale blue toque, reminded him, as the others hadn’t, that time was passing for both of them, that he was still in school and she was still waiting for him, that what existed between them was an affair, gossamer and impermanent. He removed her dragonfly hatpin and hung the hat on the coat stand beside the door, then took both her hands and led her to the bed. She smiled and put her arms around him, saying his name into his ear, but he took her hands again and sat down with her.

“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

He couldn’t speak, couldn’t begin to say what had made him melancholy. He couldn’t find a way to tell her that her hat had reminded him that life was short and that he was no closer to being worthy of her than he’d ever been. So he took her into his arms and made love to her, and told himself he didn’t care if there were never anything more between them than these late-night meetings, this circumscribed affair.

The hours passed quickly; by the time they’d pried themselves from the warmth of the bed and dressed, it was nearly three o’clock. They descended the five flights of stairs to the street, then walked to the boulevard Saint-Michel to hail a cab. They always said their goodbyes on the same corner. He’d grown to hate that patch of pavement for taking her away from him night after night. During the day, when its power to strip him of her was cloaked beneath the love-ignoring clamor of everyday life, it seemed a different place; he could almost believe it was like any other street corner, a place of no particular significance. But now, at night, it was his nemesis. He didn’t want to see it-not the bookstore across the street, nor the fenced limes, nor the pharmacy with its glowing green cross: none of it. He turned with her instead down another street and they walked toward the Seine.

“Where are we going?” she said, smiling up at him.

“I’m walking you home.”

“All right,” she said. “It’s a beautiful night.” And it was. A May breeze came up the channel of the Seine as they crossed the bridges toward the Marais. The sidewalks were still full of men and women in evening clothes; no one seemed ready to give up the night. As they walked, Andras entertained the impossible fantasy that when they reached Klara’s house they would climb the stairs together and move noiselessly down the hall to her bedroom, where they would fall asleep together in her white bed. But at Number 39 they found the lights ablaze; Mrs. Apfel ran downstairs at the sound of Klara’s key and told her that Elisabet had not yet been home.

Klara’s eyes widened with panic. “It’s past three!”

“I know,” Mrs. Apfel said, twisting her apron. “I didn’t know where to find you.”

“Oh, God, what could have happened? She’s never been this late.”

“I’ve been all over the neighborhood looking for her, Madame.”

“And I’ve been out all this time! Oh, God. Three in the morning! She said she was just going to a dance with Marthe!”

A panicked hour followed, during which Klara made a series of telephone calls and learned that Marthe hadn’t seen Elisabet all night, that the hospitals had admitted no one by the name of Elisabet Morgenstern, and that the police had received no report of foul play involving a girl of Elisabet’s description. When she’d hung up the phone, Klara walked up and down the parlor, her hands on her head. “I’ll kill her,” she said, and then burst into tears. “Where is she? It’s nearly four o’ clock!”

It had occurred to Andras that Elisabet was most likely with her blond American, and that the reason for her absence was in all probability similar to the reason for Klara’s late return. He’d sworn to keep her secret; he hesitated to speak his suspicions aloud. But he couldn’t watch Klara torture herself. And besides that, it might be dangerous to hesitate. He imagined Elisabet in peril somewhere-drink-poisoned in the aftermath of one of József’s parties, or alone in a distant arrondissement after a dance-hall night gone wrong-and he knew he had to speak.

“Your daughter has a gentleman friend,” he said. “I saw them together one night at a party. We might find out where he lives, and check there.”

Klara’s eyes narrowed. “What gentleman friend? What party?”

“She begged me not to tell you,” Andras said. “I promised her I wouldn’t.”

“When did this happen?”

“Months ago,” Andras said. “January.”

“January!” She put a hand against the sofa as if to keep herself upright. “Andras, you can’t mean that.”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner. I didn’t want to betray Elisabet’s trust.”

The look in her eyes was pure rage. “What is this person’s name?”

“I know his first. I don’t know his last. But your nephew knows him. We can go to his place-I’ll go up, and you can wait in the cab.”

She took up her light coat from the sofa, and a moment later they were running down the stairs. But when they opened the door they found Elisabet on the doorstep, holding a pair of evening shoes in one hand, a cone of spun-sugar candy in the other. Klara, standing in the doorway, took a long look at her, at the shoes, the cone of candy; it was clear she hadn’t come from an innocent evening with Marthe. Elisabet, in turn, cast a long look at Andras. He couldn’t hold her gaze, and in that instant she seemed to understand that he had betrayed her; she turned an expression of startled outrage upon him, then pushed past him and her mother and ran up the stairs. A few moments later they heard her bedroom door slam.

“We’ll talk later,” Klara said, and left him standing in the entryway, having earned the furious contempt of both Morgensterns.

“I think you ought to know what kind of woman my mother is,” Elisabet said.

She sat on a bench in the Tuileries and Andras stood before her; two days had passed since he’d last seen Klara, and no word had come from the rue de Sévigné. Then that afternoon, Elisabet had surprised him in the courtyard of the École Spéciale, causing Rosen and Ben Yakov to think she must be the mysterious woman he’d been seeing all that time-the woman they’d never met, whom he’d mentioned only in the vaguest terms during their conversations at the Blue Dove. When they emerged from studio and saw Elisabet standing in the courtyard, her cold eyes fixed upon Andras, her arms crossed over the bodice of her pale green dress, Rosen gave a whistle and Ben Yakov raised an eyebrow.

“She’s an Amazon,” he whispered. “How do you scale her in bed?”

Only Polaner knew this wasn’t the woman Andras loved-Polaner, who, thanks to Andras’s ministrations, and Klara’s, and the unwavering friendship of Rosen and Ben Yakov, had returned to the École Spéciale and entered his classes again. Only Polaner was privy to the secret of Andras’s relationship; though he had never met Elisabet, he knew as much about Klara’s history and family as Andras did himself. So when this tall, powerful girl had appeared in the courtyard of the École Spéciale, shooting cold electric fire in Andras’s direction, he guessed in an instant who she was. He distracted Rosen and Ben Yakov with a request for tea at the student café, seeing no other alternative but to leave Andras to his fate.

At the gates of the school, Elisabet turned and led Andras down the boulevard Raspail without a word. All the way to the Tuileries she stayed two steps ahead of him. She had drawn her hair into a tight ponytail; it beat a rhythm against her back as she walked. He followed her down Raspail to Saint-Germain, and they crossed over the river and into the Tuileries. She led him down paths awash in gold and lilac and fuchsia, through the too-fragrant profusion of May flora, until they reached what must have been the park’s only dismal corner: a black bench in need of repainting, a deflowered flowerbed. Behind them swept the rush of traffic on the rue de Rivoli. Elisabet sat down, crossed her arms again, and gave Andras a hate-laced stare.

“This won’t take long,” she said. And then she told him he ought to know what kind of woman her mother was.

“I know what kind of woman she is,” Andras said.

“You told her the truth about Paul and me. And now I’m going to tell you the truth about her.”

She was angry, he reminded himself. She would do whatever she could to hurt him, would tell whatever lies it suited her to tell. In a sense, he owed it to her to listen; he had betrayed her, after all.

“All right,” he said. “What do you want to tell me?”

“I suppose you think you’re my mother’s first lover since my father.”

“I know she’s led a complicated life,” he said. “That’s not news.”

Elisabet gave a short, hard laugh. “Complicated! I wouldn’t say so. It’s simple, once you know the pattern. I’ve seen pathetic men fawning over her for as long as I can remember. She’s always known what she wanted from them, and what she was worth. How do you think she got the apartment and the studio? By dancing her heart out?”

It was all he could do not to slap her. He dug his nails into the palms of his hands. “That’s enough,” he said. “I won’t listen to this.”

“Someone has to tell you the truth.”

“Your mother doesn’t take me for a fool, and neither should you.”

“But you are a fool, you stupid fool! She’s playing a game with you, using you to make another man jealous. A real man, an adult, one with a job and money. You can read about it yourself.” She produced a sheaf of envelopes from her leather schoolbag. A masculine hand; Klara’s name. She took out another sheaf, and another. Stacks and stacks of letters. She peeled an envelope from the top of the pile, extracted the letter, and began to read.

“‘My dear Odette.’ That’s what he calls her, his Odette, after the swan-princess in the ballet. ‘Since last night I’ve done nothing but think of you. Your taste is still in my mouth. My hands are full of you. Your scent is everywhere in my house.’”

Andras took the letter from her hand. There were the lines she’d just read, in a familiar script; he turned it over to look for the signature. One initial: Z. The envelope bore a year-old postmark.

“Who do you think it is?” Elisabet said, her eyes fixed on his own. “It’s your Monsieur Novak. Z is for Zoltán. She’s been his mistress for eleven years. And when things go sour, as they do now and then, she takes up with idiots like you to drive him mad. He always comes back. That’s how it works. Now you know.”

A wave of hot needles rolled through him. He felt as though his lungs had been punctured, as though he couldn’t draw a breath. “Are you finished?” he said.

She got up and smoothed the skirt of her pale green dress. “It might seem hard to take,” she said. “But I can assure you it’s no harder than what she’s doing to me, now that she knows about Paul.” And she left him there in the Tuileries with Novak’s letters.

He didn’t go to work. Instead he sat on the bench in that dusty corner of the park and read the letters. The oldest was dated January 1927. He read about Klara’s first meeting with Novak after a dance performance; he read about Novak’s failing struggle to stay faithful to his wife, and then he read Novak’s half-exultant self-castigation after his first tryst with Klara. There were cryptic references to places where they must have made love-an opera box, a friend’s cottage in Montmartre, a bedroom at a party, Novak’s office at the Sarah-Bernhardt; there were notes in which Novak pleaded for a meeting, and notes in which he begged her to refuse to see him the next time he asked. There were references to arguments involving crises of conscience on both sides, and then a six-month break in the regular stream of letters-a time when they must have been apart and she must have begun seeing someone else, because the next letters made angry mention of a young dancer named Marcel. (Was this the Marcel, Andras wondered, who’d written Klara those postcards from Rome?) Novak demanded that she break off the liaison with Marcel; it was absurd, he wrote, to think that that young salamander’s feelings could ever match his own. And she must have done as he wished, because the letters from Novak picked up their steady pace again, and they were once again full of affectionate reference to the time he’d spent with Klara. There were letters in which he wrote about the dance studio and the apartment he’d found for her, dull letters about the technicalities of the real-estate transaction; desperate notes about how he would leave his wife and come to live with her on the rue de Sévigné-marry her and adopt Elisabet-and sober-toned notes about why he couldn’t. Then another break, and more letters referring to another lover of Klara’s, this one a writer whose plays had been performed at the Sarah-Bernhardt; one week Novak swore that this was the final straw, that he was finished with Klara forever, but the next week he begged her to come to him, and the following week it was clear that she had done so-what sweet relief to have you again, what fulfillment of my wildest hopes. Finally, in early 1937, it seemed his wife had learned from their lawyer that they owned a piece of property she hadn’t known about; she’d confronted Novak, and he’d confessed. His wife had told him to make a choice. That was when he’d gone home to Hungary-to take a cure for a mild case of tuberculosis, as he’d told everyone, but also, in fact, to decide between his marriage and his mistress. It must have been on his way back from Hungary that Andras had met him at the train station. He’d come back full of remorse, ashamed at having wronged both Edith and Klara. He’d broken off his relations with Klara, and his wife had become pregnant. That piece of news had come in December. But the most recent letter was from just a few weeks ago, and concerned rumors that Klara had been seeing someone else-and not just anyone, but Andras Lévi, the young Hungarian whom Zoltán had hired at the Sarah-Bernhardt last fall. He demanded that she explain herself, and begged her to do so in person at a certain hotel, on a certain afternoon; he would be waiting for her.

Andras sat on the bench with the stack of letters beside him. That afternoon, two weeks earlier-what had he been doing? Had he been at work? At school? He couldn’t remember. Had she cancelled her classes, gone to meet Novak? Was she with him this very instant? He had the sudden desire to choke someone to death. Anyone would do: that brocaded matron beside the fountain with her bichon frisé; that sad-looking girl beneath the limes; the policeman on the corner whose moustache seemed grotesquely like Novak’s. He got to his feet, stuffed the letters into his bag, and walked back toward the river. It was dark now, a damp spring night. He stepped in front of cars that blared their horns at him, shouldered past men and women on the sidewalks, trudged through groups of clochards on the bridges. He didn’t know what time it was, and didn’t care. He was exhausted. He hadn’t eaten anything and wasn’t hungry. It was too late for him to show up at Forestier’s now, but he didn’t want to go home, either; there was a chance Klara might come to talk to him, and he couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her. He didn’t want to confront her about Novak; he was ashamed at having read the letters, at having allowed Elisabet to do this to him. He turned away and walked off down the rue des Écoles to the place de la Sorbonne, where he sat at the edge of a fountain and listened to a one-legged accordionist playing the bitterest love songs he had ever heard. When he couldn’t stand another measure he fled to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he fell into a fretful sleep on an elm-shadowed bench.

He awoke some time later in a humid blue dawn, his neck in a spasm from the way he’d slept. He remembered that some disaster had crushed him the night before; he could feel it rushing toward his consciousness again. And there it was: Zoltán Novak, the letters. He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and blinked at the morning. Before him on the grass two tiny rabbits browsed the clover. The first light of day came through the delicate endive leaves of their ears; they were so close he could hear the snip and grind of their teeth. The park was otherwise silent, and he was alone with what he knew about Klara and could not unknow.

He was right: She’d been at his apartment the night before. In fact she’d been looking for him all over town. He traced her movements through a series of increasingly anxious notes, which he received in reverse order. First the one she’d tacked to his drawing table at the studio: A, where can you be? I’ve looked everywhere. Come see me as soon as you get this. K.; next the one she’d left in the care of the good Monsieur Forestier, who was more worried than angry when Andras came to work looking like he’d spent the previous night on a bench: A, When you didn’t come home I came here to look for you. Going to check at school. K.; and finally, at the end of what felt like the longest day he’d ever lived, the note she’d left for him at home, on the table downstairs: A, I’ve gone to look for you at Forestier’s. Your K. He climbed the five flights to his attic and opened the door. In the dark, there was the clatter of a chair falling over, and Klara’s light tread on the floor, and then she was beside him. He lit a lamp and shrugged off his jacket.

“Andras,” she said. “My God, what happened to you? Where have you been?”

“I don’t want to talk,” he said. “I’m going to bed.” He couldn’t look at her. Every time he did, he saw Novak’s hands on her, his mouth on her mouth. Your taste. Nausea came at him in a towering wave, and he went to his knees beside the bed. When she put a hand on his shoulder he shrugged it away.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Look at me.”

He couldn’t. He stripped off his shirt and trousers and crawled into bed, his face to the wall. He heard her moving through the room behind him.

“You can’t do this,” she said. “We’ve got to talk.”

“Go away,” he said.

“This is crazy. You’re acting like a child.”

“Leave me alone, Klara.”

“Not until you talk to me.”

He sat up in bed, his eyes going hot. He wouldn’t cry in front of her. Without a word, he got up and took the letters from his bag and threw them on the table.

“What are those?” she said.

“You tell me.”

She picked up one of the letters. “Where did you get these?”

“Your daughter was kind enough to deliver them. It was her way of thanking me for telling you about Paul.”

“What?”

“She thought I might want to know who else you were fucking.”

“Oh, God!” she cried. “Unbelievable. She did this?”

“‘Your taste is still in my mouth. My hands are full of you. Your scent is everywhere in my house.’” He peeled the letter off the pile and threw it at her. “Or this one: ‘But for you, my life would be darkness.’ Or this: ‘Thoughts of last night have sustained me through this terrible day. When will you come to me again?’ And this one, from two weeks ago: ‘… The Hotel St. Lazare, where I’ll be waiting.’”

“Andras, please-”

“Go to hell, Klara, go to hell! Get out of my house! I can’t look at you.”

“It’s all in the past,” she said. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I never loved him.”

“You were with him for eleven years! You slept with him three nights a week. You left two other lovers for him. You let him buy you an apartment and a studio. And you never loved him? If that’s true, is it supposed to make me feel better?”

“I told you,” she said, her voice flattened with pain. “I told you you didn’t want to know everything about me.”

He couldn’t stand to hear another word. He was exhausted and hungry and depleted, his mind a scorched pot whose contents had burned away to nothing. He almost didn’t care whether there was anything between Klara and Novak still, whether their most recent break was decisive or just one of many temporary breaks. The idea that she’d been with that man, Zoltán Novak, with his odious moustache-that he’d put his hands on her body, on her birthmarks and scars, the terrain that had seemed to belong to Andras alone, but which of course belonged only to Klara, to do with as she wished-he couldn’t stand it. And then there were the others-the dancer, the playwright-and before them there had undoubtedly been others still. They seemed to become real to him all at once, the legions of her former lovers, those men who had preceded him in his knowledge of her. They seemed to crowd the room. He could see them in their ridiculous ballet costumes and their expensive overcoats and their decorated military jackets, with their good haircuts and bad haircuts and dusty or glossy shoes, their proud or defeated-looking shoulders, their grace, their awkwardness, their variously shaped spectacles, their collective smell of leather and shaving soap and Macassar oil and plain masculine desire. Klara Morgenstern: That was what they had in common. Despite what Madame Gérard had told him, he had thought himself unique in her life, without precedent, but the truth was that he was a foot soldier in an army of lovers, and once he’d fallen there would be others to replace him, and others after that. It was too much. He pulled the quilt over his shoulder and put an arm across his eyes. She said his name again in her low familiar voice. He remained silent, and she said it again. He wouldn’t make a sound. After a while he heard her get up and put on her coat, and then he heard the door open and close. On the other side of the wall a pair of new neighbors began to make noisy love. The woman called out in a breathy contralto; the man grunted in basso. Andras ground his face into pillow, wild with grief, thinking of nothing, wishing to God he were dead.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN. The Stone Cottage

BY THE NEXT MORNING he was dizzy with fever. Heat poured out of him and soaked the bed; then he was shaking with chills beneath his blanket and his jacket and his overcoat and three wool sweaters. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t get up for work, couldn’t go to school. When he got thirsty he drank the cold remains of tea straight from the kettle. When he had to piss he used the chamber pot beneath the bed. On the morning of the second day, when Polaner came looking for him, he didn’t have the strength to tell him to leave, though all he wanted was to be alone. Now it was Polaner who stepped into the role of nurse; he did it as though he’d done it all his life. He made Andras get out of bed and wash himself. He emptied the chamber pot, changed Andras’s sheets. He boiled water and brewed strong tea; he sent the concierge for soup and made Andras eat it. When Andras was clean and dressed and lying exhausted on the freshly made bed, Polaner made him tell him exactly what had happened. He took it all in with careful attention, and judged the situation grave, though not hopeless. The important thing now, he said, was for Andras to get well. There were two projects to be finished for studio. If he couldn’t get out of bed and get back to work, Polaner would suffer for it: They were team projects, and he and Andras were the team. Then there were exams to prepare for: statics and history of architecture. They would be given in ten days’ time. If Andras failed, he would lose his scholarship and be sent home. There was also the small matter of Andras’s job. For two days he’d sent no word to Monsieur Forestier.

Polaner said he would gather their things from the studio-Andras was too depleted from the fever to make the trip to the boulevard Raspail-and they would work on their projects all day. In the afternoon Polaner would go to the set-design studio with a note from Andras begging Monsieur Forestier’s pardon. Polaner would offer to do Andras’s copy work that night. In the meantime Andras would lay out a plan of study for the statics and the history exams.

He had never had a friend like Polaner, and would never have a better one as long as he lived. By the next day his job was secure, his final projects on their way to completion. They had to draw plans for a single-use building, a modern concert hall, and there were still problems to solve in the design: They had chosen a cylindrical shape for the exterior, and had to design a ceiling inside that would send the sound toward the audience without echo or distortion. When they were finished with the plans they would have to build a model. Arranging and rearranging cardboard forms consumed an entire day and night. Polaner didn’t mention going home; he slept on the floor, and was there when Andras woke in the morning.

At half past ten, just as Polaner was getting ready to go home, they heard a rising tread on the stairs. It seemed to Andras as if someone were climbing his very spine, toward the black and painful cavern of his heart. They heard a key in the lock, and the door edged open; it was Klara, her eyes dark beneath the brim of her spring hat.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

“Monsieur Polaner is on his way home,” Polaner said. “Monsieur Lévi has had enough of me for now. I taxed his brain with architecture all night, though he was still recovering from a fever.”

“A fever?” Klara said. “Has the doctor been here?”

“Polaner’s been taking care of me,” Andras said.

“I’ve been a poor doctor,” Polaner said. “He looks like he’s lost weight. I’ll be off before I do any further damage.” He put on his own spring hat, of such a fashionable shape and color that you could miss the place where he’d resewn the brim to the crown, and he slipped into the hall, closing the door quietly behind him.

“A fever,” Klara said. “Are you feeling better now?”

He didn’t answer. She sat down in the wooden chair and touched the cardboard walls of the concert hall. “I should have told you about Zoltán,” she said. “This was a terrible way for you to find out. And there might have been worse ways. You worked together. Marcelle knew.”

He hated to think of it, of Madame Gérard knowing all and seeing all. “It was a bad enough way to find out,” he said.

“I want you to know it’s over,” Klara said. “I didn’t see him two weeks ago, and I won’t if he asks again.”

“I’m sure you’ve said that every time.”

“You have to believe me, Andras.”

“You’re still tied to him. You live in the house he bought you.”

“He made the down payment for me,” Klara said. “But I paid for the rest. Elisabet doesn’t know the details of our finances. Perhaps she doesn’t want to believe I support us. That would make it difficult for her to justify the way she behaves toward me.”

“But you did love him,” Andras said. “You still do. You took up with me to make him jealous, just as you did with those others. Marcel. And that writer, Édouard.”

“It’s true that when Zoltán turned away from me, I didn’t sit home alone. Not for long, in any case. When he claimed to be moving on with his life, I moved on with mine. But I didn’t care for Marcel or Édouard the way I cared for him, so I went back.”

“So it’s true, then,” Andras said. “You do love him.”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Zoltán and I are very close, or we were, once. But we didn’t give ourselves to each other. He couldn’t, because of what he felt for Edith; and I didn’t, also because of that. In the end I decided I didn’t want to be someone’s mistress for the rest of my life. And he decided we couldn’t keep on with it if he and Edith were to have a child.”

“And now?”

“I haven’t seen him since we made those decisions. Since November.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Sometimes,” she said, and folded her hands between her knees. “He was a dear friend, and he’s been a great help with Elisabet. She’s fond of him, too, or was. He’s the closest thing she’s had to a father. When we decided to end it, she felt as though he’d left both of us. She blamed me for it. I think she hoped I was seeing him again, those nights when I was with you.”

“And what now? What if he asks you again? You were together for eleven years, nearly a third of your life.”

“It’s finished, Andras. You’re in my life now.”

“Am I?” he said. “I thought you were finished with me. I didn’t know if you could forgive me for keeping Elisabet’s business from you.”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said, without a hint of humor. “Elisabet had no right to put you in that position, but once she did, you should have told me immediately. The man is five years older than she is-a rich American, studying painting at the Beaux-Arts on a lark. Not someone who’s likely to treat her kindly, or take her seriously. And worse than that, he knows my nephew.”

“You can hardly hold that against him,” Andras said. “I believe your nephew knows everyone between the ages of sixteen and thirty in the Quartier Latin.”

“In any case, it’s got to stop. I don’t intend to let that young man prove himself dishonorable.”

“And what about what Elisabet wants?”

“I’m afraid that’s beside the point.”

“But Elisabet won’t see it that way. If you oppose her, she’ll only become more resolved.”

Klara shook her head. “Don’t try to tell me how to raise that child, Andras.”

“I don’t claim to know how. But I do know how I felt at sixteen.”

“I told myself that was why you’d kept her secret,” Klara said. “I knew you felt a certain empathy with her, and I think it’s rather sweet of you, actually. But you’ve got to imagine my position, too.”

“I see. So you’ve put an end to things between Elisabet and Paul.”

“I hope so,” Klara said. “And I’ve punished her for showing you those letters.” Her brow folded into a familiar set of creases. “She seemed rather pleased with herself when she saw how upset I was about that. She told me I had gotten what I deserved. I’ve placed her under a kind of house arrest. Mrs. Apfel is keeping watch while I’m gone. Elisabet is not to go out until she writes you a letter of apology.”

“She’ll never do it. She’ll grow old and die first.”

“That will be her decision,” Klara said.

But he knew Elisabet wouldn’t remain bound by Klara’s house arrest for long, Mrs. Apfel notwithstanding. She’d soon find a way to escape, and he worried that when she did she’d leave no forwarding address. He didn’t want to be responsible for that.

“Let me come tomorrow and speak to her,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s any point.”

“Let me try.”

“She won’t see you. She’s been in a vicious mood.”

“It can’t have been as bad as my own.”

“You know what she’s like, Andras. She can be beastly.”

“I know. But she’s still just a girl, after all.”

Klara gave a deep sigh. “And what now?” she said, looking up at him from her chair. “What do we do, after all this?”

He ran a hand over the back of his neck. The question had been in his mind. “I don’t know, Klara. I don’t know. I’m going to sit down here on the bed. You can sit beside me if you like.” He waited until she sat beside him, and then he continued. “I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you the other night,” he said. “I acted as though you’d been unfaithful to me, but you haven’t, have you?”

“No,” she said, and put a hand on his knee, where it burned like a feverish bird. “What I feel for you would make that impossible. Or absurd, at the very least.”

“How is that, Klara? What is it you feel for me?”

“It may take me some time to answer that question,” she said, and smiled.

“I can’t be what he was. I can’t give you a place to live, or be anything like a father to Elisabet.”

“I have a place to live,” she said. “And Elisabet, though she’s still a child in many ways, will soon be grown. I don’t need now what I needed then.”

“What do you need now?”

She drew in her mouth in her pensive way. “I’m not certain, exactly. But I can’t seem to stand to be away from you. Even when I’m livid with anger at you.”

“There’s still a great deal I don’t know about you.” He stroked the curve of her back; he could feel the glowing coals of her vertebrae through her thin jersey.

“I hope there’ll be time to learn.”

He drew her down with him onto the bed, and she put her head on his shoulder. He ran his hand along the warm dark length of her hair and took its upturned ends between his fingers. “Let me talk to Elisabet,” he said. “If we’re to continue with this, I can’t have her hate me. And I can’t hate her.”

“All right,” Klara said. “You’re welcome to try.” She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the slope of the ceiling, with its water stains in the shape of fish and elephants. “I was terrible to my mother, too,” she said. “It’s foolish to pretend I wasn’t.”

“We’re all terrible to our parents at sixteen.”

“Not you, I’m sure,” she said, her eyelids closing. “You love your parents. You’re a good son.”

“I’m here in Paris while they’re in Konyár.”

“That’s not your fault. Your parents worked so you could go to school, and they wanted you to come here. You write to them every week. They know you love them.”

He hoped she was right. It had been nine months since he’d seen them. Still, he could feel a fine cord stretched between them, a thin luminous fiber that ran from his chest all the way across the continent and forked into theirs. Never before had he lived through a fever without his mother; when he’d been sick in Debrecen she’d taken the train to be with him. Never had he finished a year at school without knowing that soon he’d be home with his father, working beside him in the lumberyard and walking through the fields with him in the evening. Now there was another filament, one that linked him to Klara. And Paris was her home, this place thousands of kilometers from his own. He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the time when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father’s orchard.

For the first time ever, he went to see József Hász at school. The Beaux-Arts was a vast urban palace, a monument to art for art’s sake; it made the humble courtyard and studios of the École Spéciale look like something a few boys had thrown together in an empty lot. He entered through a floriated wrought-iron gate between two stern figures carved in stone, and crossed a sculpture garden packed with perfect marble specimens of kore and kouros, straight from his art history textbook, staring into the distance with empty almond-shaped eyes. He climbed the marble entry stairs of a three-story Romanesque building and found himself in a hallway teeming with young men and women, all of them dressed with careful offhandedness. A list of studio assignments bore József’s name; a map told him where to look. He went upstairs to a classroom with a sloping north-facing ceiling made all of glass. There, among rows of students intent on their paintings, József was applying varnish to a canvas that at first glance seemed to depict three smashed bees lying close to the black abyss of a drain. Upon closer inspection, the bees turned out to be black-haired women in black-striped yellow dresses.

József didn’t seem much surprised to see Andras at his painting studio. He raised a cool eyebrow and continued varnishing. “What are you doing here, Lévi?” he asked. “Don’t you have projects of your own to finish? Are you slacking off for the day? Did you come to make me have a drink in the middle of the morning?”

“I’m looking for that American,” Andras said. “That person who was at your party. Paul.”

“Why? Are you dueling with him over his statuesque girlfriend?” He kicked the easel of the student across from him, and the student gave a shout of protest.

“You imbecile, Hász,” said Paul, for that was who it was. He stepped out from behind the canvas with a paintbrush full of burnt umber, his long equine features tightened with annoyance. “You made me give my maenad a moustache.”

“I’m sure it’ll only improve her.”

“Lévi again,” Paul said, nodding at Andras. “You go to school here?”

“No. I came to talk to you.”

“I think he wants to fight you for that strapping girl,” József said.

“Hász, you’re hilarious,” Paul said. “You should take that act on tour.”

József blew him a kiss and went back to his varnishing.

Paul took Andras’s arm and led him to the studio door. “Sometimes I can stand that jackass and sometimes I can’t,” he said as they descended the stairs. “Today I can’t, particularly.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you at studio,” Andras said. “I didn’t know where else to find you.”

“I hope you’ve come to tell me what’s going on,” Paul said. “I haven’t seen Elisabet for days. I assume her mother’s keeping her at home after that late night we had. But maybe you’ve got more information.” He gave Andras a sideways glance. “I understand you’ve got something going with Madame Morgenstern.”

“Yes,” Andras said. “I suppose you could say we’ve got something going.” They had reached the front doors of the building and sat down outside on the marble steps. Paul searched his pocket for a cigarette and lit it with a monogrammed lighter.

“So?” he said. “What’s the news, then?”

“Elisabet’s been confined to her room,” Andras said. “Her mother won’t let her out until she apologizes to me.”

“For what?”

“Never mind. It’s complicated. The thing is, Elisabet won’t apologize. She’d rather die.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, I’m afraid I’m the one who blew the whistle on the two of you. When Elisabet was out late the other night, her mother was frantic. I had to tell her Elisabet might be with you. Now it’s all out in the open. And her mother didn’t take kindly to the idea of her having a gentleman friend.”

Paul took a long draw of his cigarette and blew a gray cloud into the courtyard. “I’m relieved, to tell you the truth,” he said. “The secrecy was getting a little stifling. I’m wild about the girl, and I hate”-he seemed to search his mind for the French phrase-“sneaking around. I like to be the guy in the white cowboy hat. Do you understand me? Are you a fan of the American western?”

“I’ve seen a few,” Andras said. “Dubbed in Hungarian, though.”

Paul laughed. “I didn’t know they did that.”

“They do.”

“So you’re here on a peace mission? You want to help us, now that you’ve mucked everything up?”

“Something like that. I’d like to act as a go-between. To earn Elisabet’s trust again, if you will. I can’t have her hate me forever. Not if her mother and I are going to keep seeing each other.”

“What’s the plan, then?”

“You can’t pay a visit to Elisabet, but I can. I’m sure she’d want to hear from you. I thought you might want to send a note.”

“What if her mother finds out?”

“I plan to tell her,” Andras said. “I predict she’ll come around to you eventually.”

Paul took a long American drag on his cigarette, seeming to consider the proposition. Then he said, “Listen to me, Lévi. I’m serious about this girl. She’s like no one else I know. I hope this isn’t just going to make things worse.”

“At the moment, I’m not sure they could get much worse.”

Paul stubbed his cigarette against the marble step, then kicked it down into the dirt. “All right,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll go write a note.” He got to his feet and offered Andras a hand up. Andras stood and waited, watching a pair of finches browse for seeds in a clump of lavender. He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him, took out his pocketknife, and cut a sheaf of stems. A length of cotton string torn from the strap of his canvas satchel served to tie them. A few minutes later, Paul came downstairs with a kraft envelope in his hand.

“There’s a note,” Paul said, and handed it to him. “Good luck to us both.”

“Here goes nothing,” Andras said. His sole English phrase.

When he arrived the next day at noon, Klara was teaching a private student. It was Mrs. Apfel who opened the door. Her white apron was stained with purple juice, and she had a pair of bruised-looking moons under her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept in days. She gave Andras a tired frown; she seemed to expect nothing from him but more trouble.

“I’m here to see Elisabet,” Andras said.

Mrs. Apfel shook her head. “You’d better go home.”

“I’d like to speak to her,” he said. “Her mother knows why I’m here.”

“Elisabet won’t see you. She’s locked herself in her room. She won’t come out. Won’t even eat.”

“Let me try,” Andras said. “It’s important.”

She knit her ginger-colored eyebrows. “Believe me, you don’t want to try.”

“Give me a tray for her. I’ll take it in.”

“You won’t have any better luck than the rest of us,” she said, but she turned and led him up the stairs. He followed her into the kitchen, where a fallen blueberry cake stood cooling on an iron rack. He stood over it and breathed its scent as Mrs. Apfel made an omelet for Elisabet. She cut a fat slice of the cake and set it on a plate with a square of butter.

“She hasn’t eaten a thing in two days,” Mrs. Apfel said. “We’re going to have to get the doctor here before long.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Andras said. He took the tray and went down the hall to Elisabet’s room, where he knocked the corner of the tray twice against the closed door. From within, silence.

“Elisabet,” he said. “It’s Andras. I brought your lunch.”

Silence.

He set the tray down in the hall, took Paul’s envelope from his bag, pressed it flat, and slipped it under Elisabet’s door. For a long while he heard nothing. Then a faint scraping, as though she were drawing the note closer. He listened for the rustle of paper. There it was. More silence followed. Finally she opened the door, and he stepped in and set the tray on her little desk. She gave the food a contemptuous glance but wouldn’t look at Andras at all. Her hair was a dun-colored tangle, her face raw and damp. She wore a wrinkled nightgown and red socks with holes in the toes.

“Close the door,” she said.

He closed the door.

“How did you get that letter?”

“I went to see Paul. I thought he’d want to know what had happened to you. I thought he might want to send you a note.”

She gave a shuddering sigh and sat down on the bed. “What does it matter?” she said. “My mother’s never going to let me leave the house again. It’s all over with Paul.” When she raised her eyes to him there was a look he’d never seen in them before: grim, exhausted defeat.

Andras shook his head. “Paul doesn’t think it’s all over. He wants to meet your mother.”

Elisabet’s eyes filled with tears. “She’ll never meet him,” she said.

She was exactly Mátyás’s age, Andras thought. She would have cut her teeth when he’d cut his teeth, walked at the same time, learned to write during the same school year. But she was no one’s sister. She had no age-mate in that house, no one she could think of as an ally. She had no one with whom to divide the intensity of her mother’s scrutiny and love.

“He wants to know you’re all right,” Andras said. “If you write back to him, I’ll take the note.”

“Why would you?” she demanded. “I’ve been so hateful to you!” And she put her head against her knees and cried-not from remorse, it seemed to him, but from sheer exhaustion. He sat down in the desk chair beside the bed, looking out the window into the street below, where one set of posters touted the Jardin des Plantes and another set advertised Abel Gance’s J’accuse, which had just opened at the Grand Rex. He would wait as long as she wanted to cry. He sat beside her in silence until she was finished, until she’d wiped her nose on her sleeve and pushed her hair back with a damp hand. Then he asked, as gently as possible, “Don’t you think it’s time to eat something?”

“Not hungry,” she said.

“Yes, you are.” He turned to the tray of food on the desk and spread the butter on the blueberry cake, took the napkin and laid it on Elisabet’s knees, set the tray before her on the bed. A quiet moment passed; from below they could hear the triple-beat lilt of a waltz, and Klara’s voice as she counted out the steps for her private student. Elisabet picked up her fork. She didn’t set it down again until she’d eaten everything on the tray. Afterward she put the tray on the floor and took a piece of notepaper from the desk. While Andras waited, she scribbled something on a page of her school notebook with a blunt pencil. She tore it out, folded it in half, and thrust it into his hand.

“There’s your apology,” she said. “I apologized to you and to my mother, and to Mrs. Apfel for being so awful to her these past few days. You can leave it on my mother’s writing desk in the sitting room.”

“Do you want to send a note to Paul?”

She bit the end of the pencil, tore out a new piece of paper. After a moment she threw a glare at Andras. “I can’t write it while you’re watching me,” she said. “Go wait in the other room until I call you.”

He took the tray and the cleaned plates and brought them to the kitchen, where Mrs. Apfel stared in speechless amazement. He delivered the apology to Klara’s writing table. Finally he went to the bedroom and set the little bunch of lavender in a glass on Klara’s bedside table with a four-word note of his own. Then he went into the sitting room to wait for Elisabet’s note, and to gather his thoughts about what he’d say to Klara.

…

In August, Monsieur Forestier closed his set design studio for a three-week holiday. Elisabet went to Avignon with Marthe, whose family had a summer home there; they wouldn’t be back until the first of September. Mrs. Apfel went once again to her daughter’s house in Aix. And Klara wrote a note to Andras, telling him to come to the rue de Sévigné with enough clothing for a twelve-day stay.

He packed a bag, his chest tight with joy. The rue de Sévigné, that apartment, those sunlit rooms, the house where he’d lived with Klara in December: Now it would be theirs again for nearly two weeks. He’d longed for that kind of time with her. In the first month after he’d found out about Novak, he had lived in a state of near-constant dread; despite Klara’s reassurances, he could never shake the fear that Novak would call to her and she would go to him. The dread abated as July passed and there was no word from Novak, no sign that Klara would abandon Andras for his sake. At last he began to trust her, and even to envision a future with her, though the details were still obscure. He began to spend Sundays at her house again, and more pleasantly than in the past: His diplomacy with Elisabet had earned him her reluctant gratitude, and she could sit with him for an hour without insulting him or mocking his imperfect French. Though Klara had been furious at first when Andras had told her of his role as go-between, she had nonetheless been impressed with the change he’d brought about in Elisabet. He had made an earnest argument for Paul’s merits, and finally Klara had relented and invited Elisabet’s gentleman friend to lunch. Before long, a delicate peace had emerged; Paul had impressed Klara with his knowledge of contemporary art, his good-natured courtliness, his unfailing patience with Elisabet.

Now another milestone was approaching: the first time Andras would celebrate a birthday in Paris. In late August he would turn twenty-three. As he packed his suitcase he imagined drinking champagne with Klara on the rue de Sévigné, the two of them sweetly alone, a reprise of their winter idyll. But when he arrived at her house that morning there was a black Renault parked at the curb, its top folded down. Two small suitcases stood beside the car; a scarf and goggles lay on the driver’s seat. Klara stepped out of the house, shading her eyes against the sun; she wore a motoring duster, canvas boots, driving gloves. She had gathered her hair into two bunches at the back of her head.

“What’s this all about?” Andras said.

“Put your things in the trunk,” Klara said, throwing him the keys. “We’re going to Nice.”

“To Nice? In this car? We’re driving this car?”

“Yes, in this car.”

He gave a shout, climbed over the car, and took her in his arms. “You can’t have done this,” he said.

“I did. It’s for your birthday. We have a cottage by the sea.”

Though he knew in theory that cars and cottages could be hired, it seemed almost impossible to believe that Klara had in actuality hired a car, and that, having the car in their possession, they could simply fill its tank with gas and drive to a cottage in Nice. No struggling with baggage in a train station, no crowded third-class rail carriage smelling of smoke and sandwiches and sweating passengers, no search for a cab or horse cart at the other end of the line. Just Andras and Klara in this tiny beetle-black car. And then a house where they would be alone together. What luxury; what freedom. They piled their suitcases into the car, and Klara put on her scarf and driving goggles.

“How do you know how to drive?” he asked her as they pulled away toward the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. “Do you know everything?”

“Nearly everything,” she said. “I don’t know Portuguese or Japanese, and I can’t make brioche, and I’m a terrible singer. But I do know how to drive. My father taught me when I was a girl. We used to practice in the country, near my grandmother’s house in Kaba.”

“I hope you’ve driven more recently than that.”

“Not often. Why? Are you afraid?”

“I don’t know,” Andras said. “Should I be?”

“You’ll find out soon!”

From the rue du Pas de la Mule she turned onto the boulevard Beaumarchais and merged effortlessly into the traffic encircling the Bastille. She picked up the boulevard Bourdon; they crossed the Seine at Pont d’Austerlitz and shot off toward the south. Andras’s cap threatened to fly away, and he had to hold it to his head with one hand. They motored through the seemingly endless suburbs of Paris (Who lived in these distant neighborhoods, these balconied three-story buildings? Whose washing was that on the line?) and then out into the gold haze and the rolling green pastures of the countryside. Sturdy sheep and goats stood in bitten-down grass. Beside a farmhouse, children beat at the exoskeleton of a rusted Citroën with sticks and spades. A clutter of chickens crowded into the roadway and Klara had to blast them with a ga-zoo-bah! from the Renault’s horn. Tall feathery lindens whipped by, each with its fleeting rush of sound. For lunch they stopped beside a meadow and ate cold chicken and an asparagas salad and a peach tart that attracted yellowjackets. At Valence a thunderstorm overtook them and threw a hard slant of rain into the car before they could raise the roof; as they drove on, the windshield became so clouded with steam that they had to stop and wait for the storm to pass. It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze. But the air grew cooler with their approach, and the grasses along the road bent their seed pods in a rising wind. They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon. Klara stopped the car at an empty beach and turned off the motor. At the margin of the water, a pounding roar and a cataclysm of foam. Without a word they got out of the car and walked toward that ragged white edge.

Andras cuffed his pants and stepped into the water. When a wave rolled in, the ground slid away beneath his feet and he had to catch Klara’s arm to keep from falling. He knew that feeling, that powerful and frightening tidal pull: It was Klara, her draw upon him, her inevitability in his life. She laughed and went to her knees in the waves, letting them wash over her body and render her blouse transparent; when she stood, her skirt was decorated with seaweed. He wanted to lay her down on the cooling stones and have her right there, but she ran back across the beach toward the car, calling for him to come.

After they’d driven through the town with its white hotels, its glittering curvelet of sea, they turned onto a road so rutted and rocky it threatened to disembowel the Renault. At the top of the road, a crumbling stone cottage stood in a tiny garden surrounded by gorse. The key was in a bird’s nest above the door. They dragged their suitcases inside and fell onto the bed, too exhausted now to consider lovemaking or dinner preparations or anything besides sleep. When they awoke it was velvet dark. They fumbled for kerosene lanterns, ate the cheese and bread that had been intended for breakfast the next morning. A slow-moving fog obscured the stars. Klara had forgotten her nightgown. Andras discovered that he was allergic to some plant in the garden; his eyes burned, and he sneezed and sneezed. They spent a restless night listening to the door rattling against its jamb, the wind soughing between the window frame and the sill, the endless gripe and creak of nighttime insects. When Andras woke in the gray haze of early morning, his first thought was that they could simply get into the car and return to Paris if they wanted. But here was Klara beside him, a scattering of sand grains in the fine hair at her temple; they were at Nice and he had seen the Mediterranean. He went outside to shoot a long arc of asparagus-scented urine out over the back garden. Inside again, he curled against Klara and fell into his deepest sleep of the night, and when he awoke for the second time there was a block of hot sunlight in bed with him where she had been. God, he was hungry; he felt as if he hadn’t eaten in days. From outside he heard the snick of gardening shears. Without bothering to don a shirt or trousers or even a pair of undershorts, he went out to find Klara removing a cluster of tall flowers that looked like close-crocheted doilies.

“Wild carrot,” she said. “That’s what made you sneeze last night.” She was wearing a sleeveless red cotton dress and a straw hat; her arms glowed gold in the sunlight. She wiped her brow with a handkerchief and stood to look at Andras in the doorway. “Au naturel,” she observed.

Andras made a fig leaf of his hand.

“I think I’m finished gardening,” she said, and smiled.

He went back to the bed, which lay in a windowed alcove from which he could see a slice of Mediterranean. Eons passed before she came in and washed her hands. He had forgotten how hungry he’d been when he first awakened. He had forgotten everything else in the world. She removed her shoes and climbed onto the bed, leaning over him. Her dark hair burned with absorbed sunlight, and her breath was sweet: She’d been eating strawberries in the garden. The red veil of her dress fell over his eyes.

Outside, three pygmy goats stepped out of the gorse and ate all the clipped flowers and a good many half-grown lettuces and an empty cardboard matchbook and Klara’s forgotten handkerchief. They liked to visit this cottage; intriguing and unfamiliar things often appeared in the yard. As they sniffed the tires of the Renault, a burst of human noise from the cottage made them raise their ears: two voices calling out and calling out inside the house.

Far below the cottage, silent from that high vantage point, lay the town of Nice with its blinding white beaches. In Nice you could swim in the rolling sea. You could eat at a café by the beach. You could sleep in a rented lounge chair on the pebbled strand or stroll through the colonnade of a hotel. For five francs you could watch a film projected onto the blank wall of a warehouse. You could buy armloads of roses and carnations at a covered flower market. You could tour the ruins of Roman baths at Cemenelum and eat a picnic lunch on a hill overlooking the port. You could buy art supplies for half what they cost in Paris. Andras bought a sketchbook and twelve good pencils with leads of varying density. In the afternoons, while Klara practiced ballet, he practiced drawing. First he drew their cottage until he knew every stone and every roof angle. Then he razed the cottage in his mind and began to plan the house they could build on that land. The land had a gentle slope; the house would have two stories, one of them invisible from the front. Its roofline would lie close to the hillside and be covered with sod; they would grow lavender thick and sweet in that layer of earth. He would build the house of rough-cut limestone. He would abandon the hard geometry of his professors’ designs and allow the house to lie against the hillside like a shoulder of rock revealed by wind. On the sea-facing side, he would set sliding glass doors into the limestone. There would be a practice room for Klara. There would be a studio for himself. There would be sitting rooms and guest rooms, rooms for the children they might have. There would be a stone-paved area behind the house, large enough for a dining table and chairs. There would be a terraced garden where they would grow cucumbers and tomatoes and herbs, squashes and melons; there would be a pergola for grapes. He didn’t dare to guess how much it might cost to buy a piece of land like that or to build the house he’d designed, or whether the building council of Nice would let him do it. The house didn’t exist in a reality that included money or seaside zoning laws. It was a perfect phantom that became more clearly visible the longer they stayed. By day, as he walked the scrubby perimeter of the garden, he laid out those sea-lit rooms; by night, lying awake at Klara’s side, he paved the patio and terraced the hillside for the garden. But he didn’t show his drawings to Klara, or tell her what he was doing while she practiced. Something about the project made him cautious, self-protective; perhaps it was the vast gulf between the harmonious permanence the house suggested and the complicated uncertainty of their lives.

At the stone cottage they lived for the first time like husband and wife. Klara bought food in the village and they cooked together; Andras spoke to her about his plans for the next year, how he might work as an intern at the architecture firm that employed Pierre Vago. She told him of her own plans to hire an assistant teacher from the ranks of young dancers from abroad. She wanted to do for someone what Novak and Forestier had done for Andras. They talked as they dawdled along the road that led to town; they talked after sunset in the dark garden, sitting on wooden chairs they’d dragged out of the house. They bathed each other in a tin tub in the middle of the cottage floor. They set out vegetables and bread for the pygmy goats, and one of the goats gave them milk. They discussed the names of their children: the girl would be Adèle, the boy Tamás. They swam in the sea and ate lemon ices and made love. And on the flat dirt roads that ran along the beaches, Klara taught Andras to drive.

On his first day out he stalled and stalled the Renault until he was blind with rage. He jumped out of the car and accused Klara of teaching him improperly, of trying to make an ass of him. Without surrendering her own calm, she climbed into the driver’s seat, gave him a wink, and drove off, leaving him fuming in the dust. By the time he’d walked the two miles back to the cottage, he was sunburned and contrite. The next day he stalled only twice; the day after that he drove without a stall. They followed the hillside road down to the Promenade des Anglais and drove along the sea all the way to Cannes. He loved the press of the curves, loved the vision of Klara with her white scarf flying. On their way back he drove more slowly, and they watched the sailboats drifting over the water like kites. He navigated the tricky hill up to the cottage without a stall. When they reached the garden, Klara got out and cheered. That night, the eve of his birthday, he drove her into town for drinks at the Hôtel Taureau d’Or. She wore a sea-green dress that revealed her shoulders, and a glittering hairpin in the shape of a starfish. Her skin had deepened to a dusky gold on the beach. Most beautiful of all were her feet in their Spanish sandals, her toes revealed in their shy brown beauty, her nails like chips of pink nacre. On the deck of the Taureau d’Or he told her he loved seeing her feet bare in public.

“It’s so risqué,” he said. “You seem thrillingly naked.”

She gave him a sad smile. “You should have seen them when I was en pointe every day. They were atrocious. You can’t imagine what ballet does to the feet.” She turned her glass in careful rings on the wooden table. “I wouldn’t have worn sandals for a million pengő.”

“I would have paid two million to see you wear them.”

“You didn’t have two million. You were a schoolboy at the time.”

“I’d have found a way to earn it.”

She laughed and slipped a finger under the cuff of his shirt, smoothed the skin of his wrist. It was torture to be beside her all day like this. The more he had of her, the more he wanted. Worst of all were the times on the beach, where she wore a black maillot and a bathing cap with white racing stripes. She’d turn over on her rattan beach mat and there would be silvery grains of sand dusting her breasts, the soft rise of her pubis, the smooth skin of her thighs. He had spent most of their time on the beach shielding his erection from public view with the aid of a book or towel. The previous afternoon he’d watched her execute neat dives from a wooden tower at this very beach; he could see the tower now, ghostly in the moonlight, a skeleton standing in the sea.

“I think we ought to stay here always,” he said. “You can teach ballet in Nice. I can finish my studies by correspondence.”

A veil of melancholy seemed to fall over her features. She took a sip of her drink. “You’re turning twenty-three,” she said. “That means I’ll be thirty-two soon. Thirty-two. The more I think about it, the more it begins to seem like an old woman’s age.”

“That’s nonsense,” Andras said. “The last Hungarian women’s swimming champion was thirty-three when she won her gold medal in Munich. My mother was thirty-five when Mátyás was born.”

“I feel as if I’ve lived such a long time already,” she said. “Those days when I wouldn’t have worn sandals for a million pengő-” She paused and smiled, but her eyes were sad and faraway. “So many years ago! Seventeen years!”

This wasn’t about him, he understood. It was about her own life, about how everything had changed when she’d become pregnant with her daughter. That was what had caused the veil to fall. When the waiter came she ordered absinthe for both of them, a drink she chose only when she was sad and wanted to be lifted away from the world.

But absinthe didn’t have the same effect on him; it tended to play dirty tricks on his mind. He told himself it might be different here at Nice, at this dreamlike hotel bar overlooking the beach, but it wasn’t long before the wormwood began to do its poisonous work. A gate swung open and paranoia elbowed through. If Klara was melancholy now, it wasn’t because she’d lost her life in ballet; it was because she’d lost Elisabet’s father. Her one great love. The single monumental secret she’d never told him. Her feelings for Andras were chaff by comparison. Even her eleven-year relationship with Novak hadn’t been able to break the spell. Madame Gérard knew it; Elisabet herself knew it; even Tibor had guessed it in the space of an hour, while Andras had failed to recognize it for months and months. How absurd of him to have spent the summer worrying about Novak when the real threat was this phantom, the only man who would ever have Klara’s heart. The fact that she could sit here in a sea-green dress and those sandals, calmly drinking absinthe, pretending she might someday be Andras’s wife, and then allow herself to be pulled back to wherever she’d been pulled-by him, no doubt, that nameless faceless man she’d loved-made him want to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she cried.

“God, Andras,” she said finally. “Don’t look at me that way.”

“What way?”

“You look as if you want to kill me.”

Her limpid gray eyes. The glitter of the starfish in her hair. Her child-sized hands on the table. He was more afraid of her, of what she could do to him, than anyone he’d known in his life. He pushed back his chair and went to the bar, where he bought a pack of Gauloises, and then walked down to the beach. There was some comfort in picking up shells at the water’s edge and skipping them into the surf. He sat down on the wooden slats of a deck chair and smoked three cigarettes, one after the other. He thought he might like to sleep on the beach that night, with the waves pounding the shore in the dark and the sound of the hotel band drifting down from the plein air ballroom. But soon his head began to clear and he realized he’d left Klara sitting alone at their table. The absinthe gate was closing. His paranoia retreated. He looked back over his shoulder, and there was the sea-green brushmark of Klara’s dress disappearing into the saffron light of the hotel.

He raced up the beach to catch her, but by the time he got there she was nowhere to be seen. In the lobby, the desk clerk denied having seen a woman in green walk past; the doormen had seen her leave, but one of them thought she’d headed away from town and another thought she’d headed toward it. The car was still parked where they’d left it, at the outside corner of a dusty lot. It was quite dark now. He thought she wouldn’t walk toward town, not in her current mood. He got into the car and drove at a crawl along the beach road. He hadn’t gotten far before his headlights illuminated a sea-green flash against the roadside. She was walking swiftly, her sandals raising clouds of dust. She’d wrapped her arms around herself; he could see the familiar sweet column of her vertebrae rising out of the deep-cut back of her dress. He brought the car to a stop and jumped out to catch up with her. She gave him a swift glance over her shoulder and kept walking.

“Klara,” he said. “Klárika.”

She stopped finally, her arms limp at her sides. From around a curve in the road came a sweep of headlights; they splashed across her body as a roadster tore past and shot off toward the center of town, its passengers shouting a song into the night. When it had gone, there was nothing but the thrum and pound of waves. For a long time neither of them spoke. She wouldn’t turn to face him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I left you sitting there.”

“Let’s just go home,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about this on the side of the road.”

“Don’t be angry.”

“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought up the past. It makes me miserable to think of it, and that must have been what made you get up and go down to the beach.”

“It was the absinthe,” he said. “It makes me crazy.”

“It wasn’t the absinthe,” she said.

“Klara, please.”

“I’m cold,” she said, and put her arms around herself. “I want to get back to the house.”

He drove them, feeling no satisfaction in his mastery of the road; when they got out of the car there was no celebration of his skill. Klara went into the yard and sat down in one of the wooden chairs they’d dragged outside. He sat down beside her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did a foolish thing, a selfish thing, leaving you there at the table.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. She’d retreated to some distant place of her own, too small to admit him. “It’s been little more than torture for you, hasn’t it?” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“All of it. Our connection. My half-truths. Everything I haven’t told you.”

“Don’t speak in those maddening generalizations,” he said. “What half-truths? Do you mean what happened with Novak? I thought we’d moved past that, Klara. What else do you want to tell me?”

She shook her head. Then she put her hand to her eyes and her shoulders began to shake.

“What’s happened to you?” he said. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t make this happen by walking down to the beach for a smoke.”

“No,” she said, looking up, her eyes lit with tears. “It’s just that I understood something while you were down there.”

“What is it?” he said. “If it has a name, tell me.”

“I ruin things,” she said. “I’m a ruiner. I take what’s good and make it bad. I take what’s bad and make it worse. I did it to my daughter and to Zoltán, and now I’ve done it to you. I saw how unhappy you looked before you left the table.”

“Ah, I see. It’s all your fault. You forced Elisabet to have the problems she’s had. You forced Novak to deceive his wife. You forced me to fall in love with you. The three of us had no part in it at all.”

“You don’t know the half of what I’ve done.”

“Then tell me! What is it? Tell me.”

She shook her head.

“And if you don’t?” he said. He got to his feet and took her by the arm, pulled her up beside him. “How are we supposed to go on? Will you keep me in ignorance? Will I learn the truth someday from your daughter?”

“No,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. “Elisabet doesn’t know.”

“If we’re to be together, I have to know everything. You’ve got to decide, Klara. If you want this to continue, you’ll have to be honest with me.”

“You’re hurting my arm,” she said.

“Who was he? Just tell me his name.”

“Who?”

“That man you loved. Elisabet’s father.”

She yanked her arm away. In the moonlight he could see the fabric of her dress straining against her ribs and going smooth again. Her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t ever grab me like that,” she said, and began to sob. “I want to go home. Please, Andras. I’m sorry. I want to go home to Paris.” She put her arms around herself, shivering as though she’d caught a fever in the cool Mediterranean night. Her starfish pin glittered like a beautiful mistake, a festive scrap torn from an ocean-liner ball, blown across the sea and caught by chance in the dark waves of her hair.

He could see it: She’d been overtaken by something that was like a disease, something that shook her frame and brought a pallor to her skin. He saw it in the way she huddled beneath the blankets in the cottage, the way she stared flat-eyed at the wall. She was serious about going home; she wanted to leave in the morning. For an hour he lay in bed with her, wide awake, until he heard her breath slide into the rhythm of sleep. He didn’t have the heart to be angry at her anymore. If she wanted to go home, he’d take her home. He could gather their things that night and be ready to leave at dawn. Careful not to wake her, he crawled out of bed and began to pack their suitcases. It was good to have something concrete and finite to do. He folded her little things: the cotton dresses, her stockings, her underclothes, her black maillot; he replaced her necklaces and earrings in the satin envelope from which he’d seen her remove them. He tucked her ballet shoes into each other and folded her practice skirts and leotards. Afterward, he put on a jacket and sat alone in the garden. In the weeds beside the driveway, crickets sang a French tune; the song his crickets sang in Konyár had had different high notes, a different rhythm. But the stars overhead were the same. There was the damsel stretched on her rock, and the little bear, and the dragon. He had pointed them out to Klara a few nights earlier; she’d made him repeat them each night until she knew them as well as he did.

They drove back to Paris the next morning. He had helped her get up and dress in the blue morning light; she had wept when she saw he’d packed all their things. “I’ve ruined this holiday for you,” she said. “And today’s your birthday.”

“I don’t care about that,” he said. “Let’s get home. It’s a long drive.”

While she waited in the car he locked the cottage and restored the key to the bird’s nest above the door. For the last time he drove down the winding road toward Nice; the sea glittered as sun began to spill across its pailletted surface. He wasn’t frightened on the road, not after the lessons she’d given him. He drove toward Paris as she sat silently and watched the fields and farms. By the time they’d reached the tangle of streets outside the city, she’d fallen asleep and he had to try to remember how they’d come. The streets had their own ideas; he lost an hour trying to find his way through the suburbs before a policeman directed him to the Porte d’Italie. At last he found his way across the Seine and up the familiar boulevards to the rue de Sévigné. By that time the sun was low in the sky; the dance studio lay in shadow, and the stairs were dark. Klara woke and rubbed her face with her hands. He helped her upstairs and got her into the nightgown she’d forgotten on the bed. She lay on her back and let the tears roll down her temples and onto the pillow.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, sitting beside her. “What do you need?”

“Just to be alone,” she said. “Just to sleep for a while.”

Her tone was strangely flat. This pale woman in the embroidered gown was the ghostly sister of the Klara he knew, the woman who’d raced from her house a week earlier in a duster and driving goggles. It seemed impossible to go home. He didn’t intend to leave her in this fog. Instead he carried her things upstairs from the car, then made her a cup of the linden tea she drank when she had a headache. When he brought it in, she sat up in bed and extended a hand to him. He came to the bed and sat down beside her. She held his eyes with her eyes; a pink flush had spread across her chest. She laid her head on his shoulder and put her arms around his waist. He felt the rise and fall of her chest against his own.

“What a dreadful birthday you’ve had,” she said.

“Not at all,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’ve been with you all day.”

“There’s something for you in the dance studio,” she said. “A birthday present.”

“I don’t need a present,” he said.

“Nonetheless.”

“You can give it to me another time.”

“No,” she said. “You should have it on your birthday, as long as we’re back anyway. I’ll come down with you.” She got out of bed and took his hand. Together they went down the stairs and into the dance studio. Standing against one wall was a sheet-draped object the size and shape of an upright piano.

“My God,” he said. “What is it?”

“Take a look,” she said.

“I don’t know if I dare.”

“Dare.”

He lifted the sheet by the corner and tugged it free. There, with its polished wooden drawing surface tilted toward the window, its steel base engraved with the name of a famous cabinetmaker, was a handmade drafting table as handsome and professional as Pierre Vago’s. At the bottom of the drawing surface was a perfect groove for pencils; on the right side, a deep inkwell. A drafting stool stood beneath the table, its seat and brass wheels gleaming. His throat closed.

“You don’t like it,” she said.

He waited until he knew he could speak. “It’s too good,” he said. “It’s an architect’s table. Not something for a student.”

“You’ll still have it when you’re an architect. But I wanted you to have it now.”

“Keep it for me,” he said. He turned to her and put a hand against her cheek. “If you decide we’re going to be together, I’ll take it home.”

The color faded from her lips and she closed her eyes. “Please,” she said. “I want you to take it now. It comes apart in two pieces. Take it in the car.”

“I can’t,” he said. “Not now.”

“Please, Andras.”

“Keep it for me. Once you’ve had some time to think, you’ll let me know if I should take it or not. But I won’t take it as a memento of you. Do you understand? I won’t have it instead of you.”

She nodded, her gray eyes downcast.

“It’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten in my life,” he said.

And their holiday was at an end. September was coming. He could feel it as he walked home along the Pont Marie, carrying his bag with twelve days’ worth of clothes. September was sending its first cool streamers into Paris, its red tinge of burning. The scent of it blew through the channel of the Seine like the perfume of a girl on the threshold of a party. Her foot in its satin shoe had not yet crossed the sill, but everyone knew she was there. In another moment she would enter. All of Paris seemed to hold its breath, waiting.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. Synagogue de la Victoire

HE WOULD HAVE given anything to spend Rosh Hashanah in Konyár that year-to go to synagogue with his father and Mátyás, to eat honey cake at his mother’s table, to stand in the orchard and put a hand on the trunk of his favorite apple tree, the crown of which had always been his refuge when he was frightened or lonely or depressed. Instead he found himself in his attic on the rue des Écoles, nearing the end of his first year in Paris, waiting for Polaner to meet him so they could go to synagogue together on the rue de la Victoire. Four weeks had passed since he’d last spoken to Klara. And as the Jewish year drew to a close, all of Europe seemed to hang from a filament above an abyss. As soon as he had returned to consciousness after Nice, as soon as he’d read the letters waiting for him and made his way through the usual sheaf of newspapers, he’d been reminded that there were worse things happening in Europe than the refusal of Klara Morgenstern to reveal the essential secrets of her history. Hitler, who had flouted the Versailles treaty with his annexation of Austria that past spring, now wanted Czechoslovakia’s border region, the mountain barrier of the Sudetenland, with its military fortifications, its armament plants, its textile factories and mines. What do you think of the chancellor’s newest mania? Tibor had written from Modena. Does he really believe Britain and France will stand idly by while he strips Central Europe’s last democracy of all her defenses? It would be the end of free Czechoslovakia, we can be certain of that.

From Mátyás there was a different note of indignation, a schoolboy’s protest against Hitler’s geographic revisionism: How can he demand the “return” of the Sudetenland when it never belonged to Germany in the first place? Who does he think he’s fooling? Every second-former knows that Czechoslovakia belonged to Austria-Hungary before the Great War. To that, Andras had written back that the Hungarian government itself was likely implicated in Hitler’s plans, since Hungary would stand to regain its own lost territory if Germany took the Sudetenland; the word return was an incitement to anyone who felt that his country had been shortchanged at Versailles. But at least you’ve been paying attention in school, he wrote. Maybe you’ll get your baccalaureate after all.

The Paris papers revealed more as the situation unfolded: On the twelfth of September, in his closing speech at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Hitler brutalized the air with a fist and demanded justice for the millions of ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland; he refused to stand idly by and see them oppressed by the Czech president Beneš and his government. A few days later, Chamberlain, who had never before set foot on an airplane, flew to Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden to discuss what everyone was now calling the Sudeten crisis.

“He should never have gone,” Polaner said, over a glass of whiskey at the Blue Dove. “It’s a humiliation, don’t you see? This old man who’s never been on a plane before, made to travel to the remotest corner of Germany for a meeting with the Führer. It’s a show of force on Hitler’s part. The fact that Chamberlain went means he’s frightened. I promise you, Hitler will see his advantage and take it.”

“If anyone’s making a show of force, it’s Chamberlain,” Andras said. “He went to Berchtesgaden to make a point: If Hitler attacks Czechoslovakia, Britain and France will go to any length to bring him down. That’s what this is about.”

But soon it became clear that Andras was wrong. The papers reported that Chamberlain had come out of the meeting with a list of demands from Hitler, and was now determined to persuade his own government, and France’s, to meet the Führer’s conditions in short order. French editorials argued in favor of the sacrifice of the Sudetenland if it meant preserving the peace that had been won at such staggering cost in the Great War; the opposing view seemed to belong to a few fringe communist and socialist commentators. A few days later, envoys from the French and British governments presented President Beneš with a proposal to strip the republic of its border regions, and demanded that the Czech government accept the plan without delay. Andras found himself spending all day combing the papers and listening to the red Bakelite wireless at Forestier’s set-design studio, as if his constant attention might turn events in a different direction. Even Forestier put aside his design tools and mulled over the news with Andras. In response to the Anglo-French proposal, President Beneš had submitted a measured and scholarly memorandum reminding France that it had sworn to defend Czechoslovakia if it were threatened; a few hours after the memo was transmitted, the British and French foreign ministers in Prague pulled Beneš out of bed to insist he accept the proposal at once. Otherwise he would find himself facing Germany alone. The next day Andras and Monsieur Forestier listened in incredulous dismay as a commentator announced Beneš’s acceptance of the Anglo-French plan. The entire Czech cabinet had just resigned in protest. Chamberlain would meet with Hitler again on the twenty-second of September, this time in Bad Godesberg, to arrange the transfer of the Sudetenland.

“Well, that’s that!” Forestier said, his broad shoulders curling. “The last democracy of Central Europe kneels to Hitler at the urging of Britain and France. These are terrible times, my young Mr. Lévi, terrible times.”

Andras had assumed then that the crisis was over, that a war had been averted, even if at a cruel price. But he arrived at Forestier’s on the twenty-third of September to learn that the meeting in Bad Godesberg had yielded more demands still: Hitler wanted his troops to occupy the Sudetenland, and he required the Czech population of the area to vacate their homes and farms within a week, leaving behind everything they owned. Chamberlain brought home the new list of demands, which were promptly rejected by both the French and British governments. A military occupation was unthinkable, akin to surrendering the rest of Czechoslovakia without a fight.

The dreaded call-up has come, Andras had written to Tibor that morning, the eve of Rosh Hashanah. The Czech military has been mobilized, and our Premier Daladier has ordered a partial mobilization of French troops as well. Andras had watched it happen that morning: All over town, reservists left their shops and taxicabs and café tables and headed for points outside Paris where they would meet their battalions. When he went to send the letter to Tibor, there had been a crush at the postbox; every departing soldier seemed to have a missive to mail. Now he sat on his bed with his tallis bag in hand, waiting for Eli Polaner and thinking of his parents and his brothers and Klara and the prospect of war. At half past six Polaner arrived; they took the Métro to Le Peletier in the Ninth, and walked two blocks to the Synagogue de la Victoire.

This synagogue was not at all like the ornate Moroccan-style temple of Dohány utca, where Andras and Tibor had gone for High Holiday services in Budapest. Nor was it like the one-room shul in Konyár with its dark paneling and its wooden screen dividing the men’s section from the women’s. The Synagogue de la Victoire was a soaring Romanesque building of pale gold stone, with a grand rose window crowning the arched façade. Inside, slender columns rose toward a barrel-vaulted ceiling; a high clerestory deluged the space with light. Above the Byzantine-ornamented bimah, an inscription implored TU AIMERAS L’ETERNEL TON DIEU DE TOUT TON COEUR. By the time Andras and Polaner arrived, the service had already begun. They took seats in a pew near the back and unbuttoned their velvet tallis bags: Polaner’s tallis was of yellowed silk with blue stripes, Andras’s of fine-spun white wool. Together they said the blessing for donning the prayer shawls; together they draped the shawls over their shoulders. The cantor sang in Hebrew, How good and sweet it is when brothers sit down together. Again and again the familiar melody: one line low and somber like a work chant, the next climbing up into the arch of the ceiling like a question: Isn’t it good for brothers to sit down together? Polaner had learned the melody in Kraków. Andras had learned it in Konyár. The cantor had learned it from his grandfather in Minsk. The three old men standing beside Polaner had learned it in Gdynia and Amsterdam and Prague. It had come from somewhere. It had escaped pogroms in Odessa and Oradea, had found its way to this synagogue, would find its way to others that had not yet been built.

For Andras, who had spent the past four weeks constructing a wall around the part of himself that concerned Klara Morgenstern, the melody had the effect of an earthquake. It began as a small tremor, just enough to make the wall tremble-yes, it was good when brothers sat down together, but it had been months, months, since he’d seen his own brothers-and then there was a jolt of unbearable homesickness for Konyár, and a second jolt of homesickness for the rue de Sévigné and for the deeper, more intimate home that was Klara herself. For the past four weeks he had immersed himself in the news of the world and turned his thoughts away from her; late at night, when it was no use to pretend that he had really put her out of his mind, he told himself that her silence alone could not be taken to mean that all was over. Though she hadn’t contacted him, she hadn’t sent back his letters or requested that he return the things she kept at his apartment, either. She hadn’t given him reason to abandon hope altogether. But now, as the population of Paris fled to the countryside in anticipation of a bombardment, as the abstract possibility of war became a real and tangible thing, what was he supposed to make of her continued silence? Would she leave Paris without letting him know? Would she leave under the protection of Zoltán Novak, in a private car he had sent for her? At that very moment was she packing the same suitcase Andras had unpacked for her a few weeks earlier?

He pulled his tallis closer and tried to still his thoughts; there was some relief in repeating the prayers, some comfort in Polaner’s presence and the presence of these other men and women who knew the words by heart. He said the prayer that listed the sins committed by the House of Israel, and the one in which he asked the Lord to keep his mouth from evil and his lips from speaking guile. He said the prayer of gratitude for the Torah, and listened to others sing the words written in the white-clad scrolls. And at the end of the service he prayed to be written into the Book of Life, as if there might still be a place in such a book for him.

After the service, he and Polaner walked across the river to the students’ dining club, which had emptied over the summer, filled again as the schools prepared to reopen, and then emptied again with the threat of war. The server loaded Andras’s plate with bread and beef and hard oily potatoes.

“At home, my mother would be serving brisket and chicken noodle soup,” Polaner said as they took their plates to a table. “She would never let potatoes like these enter her kitchen.”

“You can’t blame the potato,” Andras said. “It’s hardly the potato’s fault.”

“It always begins with the potato,” Polaner said, raising an eyebrow darkly.

Andras had to laugh. It seemed a miracle that Polaner could be sitting across the table from him after what had happened last January. Though much was wrong with the world, it could not be denied that Eli Polaner had recovered from his injuries and had been brave enough to return to the École Spéciale for a second year.

“Your mother must have hated to let you leave Kraków,” Andras said.

Polaner unfolded his napkin and arranged it on his lap. “She’s never glad to see me go,” he said. “She’s my mother.”

Andras looked at him carefully. “You never told your parents what happened, did you?”

“Did you think I would?”

“You nearly died, after all.”

“They’d never have let me come back,” Polaner said. “They’d have shipped me off to some Freudian sanatorium for a talking cure, and you’d be lonely tonight, copain.”

“Lucky for me, then, that you didn’t tell,” Andras said. He had missed his friends, and Polaner in particular. He had imagined that by now they would all be dining at this club again, that soon they would be together in the studio, that they’d be meeting after classes at the Blue Dove to drink black tea and eat almond biscuits. He’d imagined himself narrating their exploits to Klara, making her laugh as they sat by the fire on the rue de Sévigné. But Rosen and Ben Yakov were home with their families, and he and Polaner were here alone together, and the École Spéciale had suspended the beginning of classes, as had all the other colleges of Paris. And he wasn’t narrating anything to Klara at all.

As the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur began to unfold, he told himself he would likely hear from her soon. War seemed inevitable. At night there were practice blackouts; the few corner lamps that remained lit were covered with black paper hoods to cast their light downward. Departing families clotted the trains and raised a cacophony of car horns in the streets. Five hundred thousand more men were called to the colors. Those who stayed in Paris rushed to buy gas masks and canned food and flour. A telegram arrived from Andras’s parents: IF WAR DECLARED COME HOME FIRST AVAIL TRAIN. He sat on his bed with the telegram in his hands, wondering if this were the end of everything: his studies, his life in Paris, all of it. It was the twenty-eighth of September, three days before Hitler’s threatened occupation of the Sudetenland. In seventy-two hours his life might fall apart. It was impossible to wait any longer. He would go to the rue de Sévigné at once and demand to see Klara; he would insist that she let him escort her and Elisabet out of the city as soon as they could pack their bags. Before he could lose his nerve, he threw on a jacket and ran all the way to her house.

But when he reached the door, he found his way barricaded by Mrs. Apfel. Madame Morgenstern would see no one, she said. Not even him. And she had no plans to leave the city, as far as Mrs. Apfel knew. At the moment she was in bed with a headache and had asked particularly that she not be disturbed. In any case, hadn’t Andras heard? There was to be a meeting at Munich the next day, a final effort to negotiate peace. Mrs. Apfel was certain those idiots would come to their senses. He would see, she said; there wouldn’t be a war after all.

Andras hadn’t heard. He ran to Forestier’s and spent the next two days with his ear sewn to the wireless. And on the thirtieth of September it was announced that Hitler had reached an accord with France, Britain, and Italy: Germany would have the Sudetenland in ten days’ time. There would, after all, be a military occupation. The Sudeten Czechs would be required to leave their homes and shops and farms without taking a stick of furniture, a single bolt of cloth or ear of corn, and there was to be no program of compensation for the lost goods. In the regions occupied by Polish and Hungarian minorities, popular votes would determine new frontiers; Poland and Hungary would almost certainly reclaim those lost territories. The radio announcer read the agreement in quick grainy French, and Andras struggled to make sense of it. How was it possible that Britain and France had accepted a plan almost identical to the one they’d rejected out of hand a few days earlier? The radio station broadcast the noise of celebration from London; Andras could hear the local jubilation well enough just outside Forestier’s studio, where hundreds of Parisians cheered the peace, celebrating Daladier, praising Chamberlain. The men who had been called up could now come home. That was an unarguable good-so many written into the Book of Life for another year. Why, then, did he feel more as Forestier seemed to feel-Forestier, who sat in the corner with his elbows on his knees, his forehead hammocked in his hands? The recent series of events seemed clothed in disgrace. Andras felt the way he might have if, after the attack on Polaner, Professor Perret had preserved peace at the École Spéciale by expelling the victim.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, Andras and Polaner went to hear Kol Nidre at the Synagogue de la Victoire. With solemn ceremony, with forehead-scraping genuflections, the cantor and the rabbi prayed for rachmones upon the congregation and the House of Israel. They declared that the congregants were released from the vows they’d made that year, to God and to each other. They thanked the Almighty that Europe had avoided war. Andras gave his thanks with a lingering sense of dread, and as the service progressed, his unhappiness flowed into another channel. That week, the threat of war had once again proved an effective distraction from the situation with Klara. For a time he had fooled himself, had let himself believe that her month of silence might contain a tacit promise, a suggestion that she was still wrestling with the problem that had sent them home early from Nice. But he couldn’t deceive himself any longer. She didn’t want to see him. They were finished; that was clear. Her silence could not be read otherwise.

That night he went home and put her things into a wooden crate: her comb and brush, two chemises, a stray earring in the shape of a daffodil, a green glass pillbox, a book of Hungarian short stories, a book of sixteenth-century French verse from which she liked to read aloud to him. He lingered for a moment over the book; he’d bought it for her because it contained the Marot poem about the fire that dwelt secretly in snow. He turned to the poem now. Carefully, with his pocketknife, he cut the page from the book and put it into the envelope that contained her letters. Those he kept, because he couldn’t bear to part with them. He wrote her a note on a postcard he’d bought as a keepsake months earlier: a photograph of the Square Barye, the tiny park at the eastern tip of the Île Saint-Louis, where he’d spoken the Marot poem into her ear on New Year’s Day. Dear Klara, he wrote, here are a few things you left with me. My feelings for you are unchanged, but I cannot continue to wait without knowing the reason for your silence, or whether it will be broken. So I must make the break myself. I release you from your promises to me. You need not be faithful to me any longer, nor conduct yourself as if you might someday be my wife. I have released you, but I cannot release myself from what I vowed to you; you must do that, Klara, if that is what you want. In the meantime, should you choose to come to me again, you will find that I am still, as ever, your ANDRAS.

He nailed the top onto the crate and hefted it. It weighed almost nothing, those last vestiges of Klara in his life. In the dark he went to her house one last time and set the box on the doorstep, where she would find it in the morning.

The next day he prayed and fasted. During the early service he felt certain he had made a terrible mistake. If he’d waited another week, he thought, she might have come back to him; now he had secured his own unhappiness. He wanted to run from the synagogue to the rue de Sévigné and retrieve the box before anyone found it. But as the fast scoured him from the inside, he began to believe that he’d done the right thing, that he’d done what he had to do to save himself. He pulled his tallis around his shoulders and leaned into the repetition of the eighteen benedictions. The familiar progression of the prayer brought him greater certainty. Nature had its cycles; there was a time for all things, and all things passed away.

By the evening service he was scraped out and numb and dizzy from fasting. He knew he was sliding toward some abyss, and that he was powerless to stop himself. At last the service concluded with the piercing spiral of the shofar blast. He and Polaner were supposed to go to dinner on the rue Saint-Jacques; József had invited them to break the fast with his friends from the Beaux-Arts. They walked across the river in silence, sunk into the last stages of their hunger. At József’s there was music and a vast table of liquor and food. József wished them a happy new year and put glasses of wine into their hands. Then, with a confidential crook of his finger, he drew Andras aside and bent his head toward him.

“I heard the most remarkable thing about you,” he said. “My friend Paul told me you’re involved with the mother of that tall girl, his obstreperous Elisabet.”

Andras shook his head. “Not anymore,” he said. And he took a bottle of whiskey from the table and locked himself in József’s bedroom, where he got blind drunk, shouted curses at himself in the mirror, terrified pedestrians by leaning out over the balcony edge, vomited into the fireplace, and finally passed into unconsciousness on the floor.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. Café Bédouin

JUDAISM OFFERED no shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn, no injunction against shaving or listening to music or going to work. He couldn’t live in his torn clothes, couldn’t spend his days sitting in ashes. Nor could he turn to more secular modes of comfort; he couldn’t afford to drink himself into oblivion every night or suffer a nervous collapse. After he had scraped himself off József’s parquet floor and crawled back to his own apartment, he concluded that he had reached the nadir of his grief. The thought itself was medicinal. If this was the lowest point, then things would have to improve. He had made the break with Klara. Now he had to go on without her. Classes would soon begin again at the École Spéciale; he couldn’t fail his second year of school on her account. Nor could he justify hanging himself or leaping from a bridge or otherwise indulging in Greek tragedy. He had to go about the business of his life. He thought these things as he stood at the window of his garret, looking down into the rue des Écoles, still nursing a wild and irrepressible hope that she’d come around the corner in her red hat, half running to see him, the skirt of her fall coat flying behind her.

But when her silence stretched into a seventh week, even his most fantastical hopes began to dull. Life, oblivious to his grief, continued. Rosen and Ben Yakov returned to Paris with the rest of the students of the École Spéciale, Rosen in a state of chronic rage over what had happened and was still happening in Czechoslovakia, Ben Yakov pale with love for a girl he’d met in Italy that summer, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi in Florence. He had vowed to bring the girl to Paris as his bride; he’d taken a job reshelving books at the Bibliothèque Nationale to save money for that purpose. Rosen had a new passion, too: He had joined the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme, and was consumed with rallies and meetings. Andras himself had less time than ever to consider his situation with Klara. With the help of Vago’s recommendation, he had been offered the architecture internship for which he’d applied in the spring. He’d had to cut back his hours at Forestier’s, but there was a small stipend to make up for the loss of income. Now, three afternoons a week, he found himself at the elbow of an architect named Georges Lemain, playing the junior intern’s role of plan-filer, pencil-line-eraser, black-coffee-fetcher, calculation-maker. Lemain was a ruler-narrow man with a sleek head of clipped gray hair. He spoke rapid metallic French and drew with machinelike precision. Often he infuriated his colleagues by singing operatic airs as he worked. As a result he’d been sequestered in a far corner of the office, walled off by bookshelves filled with back issues of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. As Andras worked at his own lowly desk beside Lemain’s great drawing table, he learned the airs and could soon sing them on his own. In return for his tolerance and diligence, Lemain began to help Andras with his school assignments. His fleet-looking angles of glass and polished planes of stone began to find their way into Andras’s designs. He encouraged Andras to keep a portfolio of private sketches, work that had nothing to do with his École Spéciale projects; he urged Andras to show him ideas that he’d been developing. And so, one afternoon in late October, Andras ventured to bring in the plans for the summer house in Nice. Lemain spread the plans on his own worktable and bent over the elevations.

“A wall like this won’t last five years in Nice,” he said, framing a segment of Andras’s drawing with his thumbs. “Consider the salt. These crevices will give it a foothold.” He laid a piece of tracing paper over Andras’s drawing and sketched in a smooth wall. “But you’ve found a clever way to use the grade of the hill. The oblique orientation of the patio and terrace works well with the topography.” He placed another sheet of tracing paper over the rear elevation and joined two levels of the terrace into a single curving slope. “Not too much terrace, though. Keep the shape of the hill intact. You can plant rosemary to hold the soil in place.”

Andras watched, making further changes in his mind. In the hard light of the office, the plans seemed less like a blueprint for a life he desired and more like the blank shape of a client’s house. That room need not be called a ballet studio; it was simply a light-filled salon. And those two small bedrooms on the main level might not be children’s rooms; they could be chambres 2 and 3, to be filled according to the client’s whims. The kitchen did not have to contain the imagined remnants of an abandoned meal; the chambre principal didn’t have to accommodate two Hungarian émigrés, or anyone in particular. All afternoon he erased and redrew until he believed he had chased the ghosts from the design.

With the rolled-up plans and Lemain’s sheets of tracing paper under his arm, he made his way toward the rue des Écoles through a confetti of dry leaves. The sound of their scrape and crunch against the sidewalk made him think of a thousand autumn afternoons in Konyár and Debrecen and Budapest, the burnt smell of nuts roasting in the street vendor’s cast-iron kettle, the stiff gray wool of school uniforms, the flower-sellers’ jars suddenly full of wheat sheaves and velvet-faced sunflowers. He paused at the window of a photographer’s studio on the rue des Écoles, where a new series of portraits had just been displayed: somber Parisian children in peasant clothing posed against a painted harvest backdrop. The children all wore shoes, and the shoes were brilliant with polish. He had to laugh aloud, imagining Tibor and Mátyás and himself arrayed in front of a real hay wagon in the clothes they’d worn when they were children: not these impeccable smocks and trousers, but brown workshirts sewn by their mother, hand-me-down dungarees, rope belts, caps made from the cloth of their father’s disintegrated overcoats. On their feet they would have worn the fine brown dust of Konyár. Their pockets would have been packed with small hard apples, their arms sore from baling hay for the neighboring farmers. From the house would come the rich red smell of chicken paprikás; their father would have sold so much wood for new hay wagons and sheds that they would eat chicken every Friday until winter. It was a good time, that stretch of warm days in October after the hay came in. The air was still soft and fragrant, the pond that would soon be frozen still a bright liquid oval reflecting mill and sky.

In the photographer’s window glass, a faint shape passed across the portraits of the children: the flash of a green woolen coat, the gold sheaf of a braid. The reflection crossed the street in his direction. As it approached, its anonymous features knit themselves into a form he knew: Elisabet Morgenstern. She gave him a hard tap on the shoulder and he turned.

“Elisabet,” he said. “What are you doing in the Latin Quarter on a Thursday afternoon? Going to meet Paul?”

“No,” she said, and gave him her hard stare. “I came to find you.” She pulled a tin of pastilles from her bag and shook one into her palm. “I’d offer you one, but I’m almost out.”

“What’s wrong?” he said, his insides clenching. “Has something happened to your mother?”

Elisabet rolled the pastille around in her mouth. When she spoke, Andras caught a whiff of anise. “I don’t want to talk here on the sidewalk,” she said. “Can’t we go somewhere?”

The Blue Dove was close by, but Andras didn’t want to meet his friends. Instead he led her around the corner and up the hill to the Café Bédouin, where he and Klara had met for a drink what seemed a lifetime ago. He hadn’t been back since that night. The same toothy row of liquor bottles stood behind the bar, and the same faded lilac curtains hung at the windows. They sat down at a table along the banquette and ordered tea.

“What’s this about?” he said, once the waiter had left them.

“Whatever you’re doing to my mother, you’d better stop,” Elisabet said.

“I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

“That’s exactly my point! To put it bluntly, Andras, you’re acting like a cad. My mother’s been miserable. She hardly eats. She won’t listen to music. She sleeps all the time. And she’s at me for every little thing. My marks in school aren’t high enough, or I’m not doing my chores properly, or I’ve taken the wrong tone with her.”

“And this is somehow my doing?”

“Who else’s? You’ve dropped her entirely. You don’t come to the house anymore. You sent back all her things.”

In an instant his grief rushed back as if it had never left him. “What was I supposed to do?” he said. “I stood it as long as I could. She wouldn’t write to me or see me. And I did go to her. I went after Rosh Hashanah, when everyone was talking about an evacuation. Mrs. Apfel said your mother wasn’t receiving anyone, least of all me. Even after that, she didn’t send word. I had to give it up. I had to respect her wishes. And I had to keep myself from losing my mind, too.”

“So you walked away because it was easier for you.”

“I didn’t walk away, Elisabet. I wrote to her when I sent her things. I told her my feelings were unchanged. She didn’t write back. It’s clear she doesn’t want to see me.”

“If that’s true, then why is she so unhappy? It’s not as though she’s seeing someone else. She never goes out. At night she’s always home. On Sunday afternoons she lies in bed.” The waiter delivered their tea, and Elisabet stirred milk into her cup. “She never gives me a moment alone with Paul. I have to sneak out in the middle of the night to see him.”

“Is that what this is about? You can’t get a moment alone with Paul?”

She glared at him, her mouth tight with disgust. “You’re an ass, do you know that? A real ass. Despite what you think, I do care how my mother feels. More than you do, apparently.”

“I care!” he cried, leaning across the table. “I’ve been going mad over this. But I can’t change her mind for her, Elisabet. I can’t make her feel for me what she doesn’t feel. If we’re going to speak, she’ll have to be the one to contact me.”

“But she won’t, don’t you see? She’ll stay miserable. She can keep it up, you know. She’s made a project of it all her life. And she’ll make me miserable, too.” She glanced down at her hand, where Andras noticed for the first time a ring on her fourth finger: a diamond with two leaf-shaped emeralds. As he studied it, she gave the band a contemplative twist.

“Paul and I are engaged,” she said. “He wants to take me to New York when I’m finished with school next June.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Does your mother know about this?”

“Of course not! You know what she’d say. She wants me to wait until I’m thirty before I look at a man. But I’d think she wouldn’t want me to end up like her, alone and old.”

“She doesn’t want you to end up like her. That’s the point! She was too young when she had you. She doesn’t want you to have to struggle like she did.”

“Let me tell you something,” Elisabet said, and gave him her granite-hard look. “I would never end up like her. If I got pregnant by some man who didn’t love me, I know what I’d do. I know girls who’ve done it. I’d do what she should have done.”

“How can you speak that way?” he said. “She gave up her whole life to raise you.”

“That’s not my fault,” Elisabet said. “And it doesn’t mean she can decide what I do once I turn eighteen. I’ll marry whomever I want to. I’ll go to New York with Paul.”

“You’re a selfish child, Elisabet.”

“Who are you calling selfish?” She narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger at him across the café table. “You’re the one who dropped her when she got depressed. A person in that state doesn’t invite people to lunch or send love notes. But you probably never cared for her at all, did you? You wanted to be her lover, but you didn’t really want to know her.”

“Of course I did!” he said. “She was the one who pushed me away.” But as he said it, he experienced a kind of pressure change, a quiet shock that thrummed in his ears. She had pushed him away, had done it more than once. But he had pushed her away too. At Nice, at the Hotel Taureau d’Or, when she’d seemed on the verge of speaking to him about her past, he’d left her alone at the table rather than hear what she might say. And later that night at the cottage, when he’d demanded she tell him everything, he had done it so roughly he’d frightened her. Then he’d packed her things and driven her back to Paris. He had tried to see her exactly once since then. He’d written a single postcard and returned her things, then set about erasing her from his mind, his life. Their love would have a neat, sad ending: a box of things dispached, a note unanswered. He would never have to hear the revelations that might hurt him or change the way he thought of her. Instead he’d chosen to preserve his idea of her-his memory of her small strong body, of the way she listened and spoke to him, of their nights together in his room. As much as he’d told himself he wanted to know everything about her, part of him had retreated in fear. He thought he’d loved her, but what he had loved wasn’t all of her-no more than the silvery images on those long-ago cards had been, or her name on an ivory envelope.

“Do you think she’ll see me?” he asked Elisabet.

She looked at him for a long moment, a faint wash of relief warming the cold blue pools of her eyes. “Ask her yourself,” she said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN. An Alley

IN THE NINE WEEKS since he’d seen her, time had not lain dormant. The earth had continued its transit around the sun, Germany had marched into the Sudetenland, and change had worked its way into the smaller orbit of his life. There was the raw feeling of wind at the back of his neck; he had cut the hair he’d grown long at her request. His morning tutorials with Vago had ended, and last year’s graduates were gone; the new first-year students paid mute attention when he and his classmates gave their critiques in studio. He had mastered the French language, which had crossed the boundary of his unconscious mind and established itself in the territory of his dreams. He had begun his internship at the architecture firm, his first job in his chosen field. And there were new set designs at Forestier’s (for Lysistrata, a foreshortened Parthenon and a forest of column-like phalluses; for The Cherry Orchard, a drawing room whose walls, made of sheer scrim fabric and lined with hidden lights, became increasingly transparent throughout the play until they disappeared to reveal the rows of trees beyond).

Then there was his room on the rue des Écoles. He had pulled the table into the sloping cave of the eaves, where he could pin plans against the ceiling. He’d gotten a green-shaded lamp to illuminate his work, and had tacked drawings of buildings to the walls-not the ocean liners and icebergs his professors designed, nor the monumental architecture of Paris, but the neat ovoids of Ghanaian huts and the nestlike clusters of American Indian cliff-dwellings and the gold stone walls of Palestine. He’d copied the images from magazines and books, had watercolored them with paints bought cheaply at Nice. On the floor was a thick red rug that smelled of woodsmoke; on the bed, a butter-colored bedspread made from a torn theater curtain. And beside the hearth was a deep low armchair of faded vermilion plush, a reject he’d found one morning on the sidewalk in front of the building. It had been lying facedown in a posture of abject indignity, as though it had tried and failed to stagger home after a night of hard drinking. The chair had a droll companion, a fringed and tufted footstool that resembled a shaggy little dog.

It was in this armchair that Klara sat now. He had written to her, had told her he wanted to see her, had asked for nothing more than her company for an evening. Though he’d told himself not to expect an answer, he hoped Elisabet might prevail upon her to write back. Then tonight he had come home from Forestier’s to find her sitting in the chair, her black shoes lined up beside it like a pair of quarter notes. He stood in the doorway and stared, afraid she might be an apparition; she got up and took the bag from his shoulder, slid her arms underneath his coat, held him against her chest. There was her smell of lavender and honey, the bready scent of her skin. The familiarity of it nearly brought him to tears. He put a thumb to the hollow of her throat, touched the amber button of her blouse.

“You’ve cut your hair,” she said.

He nodded, unable to speak.

“And you look thin,” she continued. “You look as if you haven’t been eating.”

“Have you?” he said, and studied her face. The hollows beneath her eyes were shaded violet; the beach gold of her skin had faded to ivory. She looked almost transparent, as if a wind had blown her empty from the inside. She held her body as if every part of it hurt.

“I’m going to make you some tea,” he said.

“Don’t trouble.”

“Believe me, Klara, it’s no trouble.” He put water on to boil and made tea for both of them. Then he built up the fire and sat down on the fringed footstool. He pushed her skirt up above the knee, unhooked the metal loops of her garters from their rubber nubs, removed her stockings. He didn’t caress her legs, though he wanted to; he didn’t bury his face in her thighs. Instead he took her feet in his hands and followed their arches with his thumbs.

She let out a cry, a sigh. “Why do you persist with me?” she said. “What is it you want?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Klara. Maybe just this.”

“I’ve been so unhappy since we came back from Nice,” she said. “I could hardly drag myself from bed. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t write a letter or mend a dress. When it looked like France might go to war, I had the terrible thought that you might volunteer to fight.” She paused and shook her head. “I spent two sleepless nights trying to work up the nerve to come to you, and gave myself such a terrible headache that I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t teach. I’ve never been too sick to teach, not in fifteen years. Mrs. Apfel had to post a note saying I was ill.”

“You told her to send me away if I came to see you.”

“I didn’t think you’d come except to tell me you were going off to war. I didn’t think I could survive that piece of news. And then you sent back my things. God, Andras! I read your note a hundred times. I made a hundred drafts of a reply and threw them away. Everything I wrote seemed wrong or cowardly.”

“And then France didn’t go to war after all.”

“No. And I was selfishly happy, believe me, even though I knew what it meant for Czechoslovakia.”

He smiled sadly. “I didn’t really send back all your things, after all. I kept the poem about Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige.”

“The Marot.”

“Yes. I cut it out of your book.”

“You vandalized my book!”

“I’m afraid so.”

She shook her head and rested her forehead in her palm, her elbow pillowed on the arm of the chair. “When your letter came this week, my daughter told me she’d lose all respect for me if I didn’t go to see you at once.” She paused to give him a wry half smile. “At first I was just astonished to learn that she had any respect for me at all. Then I decided I had better come.”

“Klara,” he said, moving closer and taking her hands in his own. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you the difficult questions now. I have to know what you were thinking when we came back from Nice. You have to tell me about-I don’t even know the man’s name. Elisabet’s father. You have to tell me why you came here to France.”

She sighed and looked into the fire, where the heat ran like a volatile liquid through the coals. Her eyes seemed to drink the red light of it. “Elisabet’s father,” she said, and ran a hand along the velvet arm of the chair. “That man.”

And then, though it was already past midnight, she told him her story.

In the second decade of that century, the best ballet students in Budapest had studied under Viktor Vasilievich Romankov, the willful and eccentric third son of a family of penniless Russian aristocrats. In St. Petersburg, when it had still been St. Petersburg, Romankov had studied at the Imperial School of Ballet and danced in the famous ballet company at the Mariinsky Theater; at thirty-five he left to open his own school, where he taught hundreds of dancers, among them the great Olga Spessivtzeva and Alexandra Danilova. As a young man, he himself had struggled to distill the tincture of precision into his ballet technique; his efforts to demystify the physiology of dance, and the patience he had developed in his own training, had made him an unusually effective teacher. His renown spread west and crossed the Atlantic. When his family lost the last of its once-great fortune in the early rumblings of the revolution, he fled St. Petersburg, intending to emigrate to Paris along the path traced by his hero Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes. But by the time Romankov reached Budapest he was exhausted and broke. He found himself unexpectedly in love with that city of bridges and parks, of ornately tiled buildings and tree-lined boulevards. Not more than a few days passed before he made inquiries into the Hungarian Royal Ballet; it turned out that its academy had a hopelessly antiquated system of training, and had long been in need of a change. The artistic director of the school knew of Romankov. He was precisely the sort of person the school had wanted to recruit; she was more than happy to have him join the faculty. So there in Budapest he’d stayed.

Klara had been one of his earliest pupils. She had started with him when she was eleven. He had picked her out of a class he’d glimpsed through a window as he walked through the Jewish Quarter; he went straight into the studio, took her by the hand from among her classmates, told the instructress that he was a friend of the family and that there was an urgent matter at home. Outside, he explained to Klara that he was a ballet teacher from St. Petersburg, that he had taken note of her talent and wanted to see her dance. Then he walked her to the Royal Ballet School on Andrássy út, a third-floor honeycomb of practice studios much shabbier than the school Klara had just left behind. The floors were gray with age, the pianos scarred, the walls devoid of even a single Degas print, the air redolent of feet and shoe satin and rosin. No classes were meeting that day; the studios stood empty of everything but the strange humming resonance that hovered in rooms whose natural state was to be filled with music and dancers. Romankov took Klara to one of the smaller studios and sat down at the piano. As he pounded out a minuet she danced her butterfly piece from the previous year’s recital. The music was wrong but the tempo was right; as she danced, she had the sense that something fateful was taking place. When she’d finished, Romankov clapped his hands and made her take a bow. She was splendid for her age, he said, and not too old for him to correct what was wrong with her technique. She must begin her training immediately; this was the school where she would become a ballerina. He must speak to her parents that very day.

Eleven-year-old Klara, flattered by his vision of her future, took him home to her parents’ villa on Benczúr utca. In the sitting room with its salmon-colored sofas, Romankov announced to Klara’s startled mother that her daughter was wasting her time at the studio on Wesselényi utca and must enroll at the Royal Ballet School at once. It was possible that Klara had a brilliant future in ballet, but he must undo the damage that her current teacher had done. He showed Mrs. Hász the mannered curl of Klara’s hand, the exaggerated flatness of her fifth position, the jerky exactitude of her port de bras; then he smoothed her hands into a more childlike curl, made her stand in a looser fifth, took her arms by the wrists and floated them through the positions as though through water. This was how a dancer should look, how she should move. He could train her to do this, and if she excelled she would have a place in the Royal Ballet.

Klara’s mother, who, through an accident of fate and love, had found herself extracted from rural oblivion in Kaba and placed at the center of the most exalted Jewish social circle of Budapest, had never imagined that Klara might someday become a professional dancer; she had imagined lives of ease and comfort for her children. Of course Klara studied ballet, grace being a necessary attribute for young ladies of her social position. But a career as a ballerina was out of the question. She thanked Romankov for his interest and wished him well with his new position at the Royal Ballet School; she would speak to Klara’s father that evening. Once she had sent him away she took Klara upstairs to the nursery and explained to her why she could not study ballet with the nice Russian man. Dancing was a pleasant pastime for a child, not something one did in front of audiences for money. Professional dancers led lives of poverty, deprivation, and exploitation. They rarely married, and when they did, their marriages ended unhappily. When Klara was grown she would be a wife and mother. If she wanted to dance she could give balls for her friends, as her anya and apa did.

Klara nodded and agreed, because she loved her mother. But at eleven years old she already knew she would be a dancer. She’d known it since her brother had taken her to see La Cendrillon at the Operaház when she was five. The next time her governess dropped her off for a dancing lesson at the school on Wesselényi utca, she ran the seven blocks to the Royal Ballet School on Andrássy út and asked one of the dancers there where she might find the tall red-bearded gentleman. The girl took her to a studio at the end of a hallway, where Romankov was just preparing to teach an intermediate lesson. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see Klara; he made a place for her at the practice barre between two other children, and, in his Russian-accented baritone, led them through a series of difficult exercises. At the end of class Klara returned to the other ballet school in time to meet her governess, to whom she mentioned nothing of her adventure. It was three weeks before Klara’s parents discovered her defection from the studio on Wesselényi utca. By then it was too late: Klara had become a devotee of Romankov and the Royal Ballet School. Klara’s indulgent father convinced her mother that there could be no real danger of their daughter’s ending up on the stage; the school was merely a more rigorous version of the one she’d attended before. He’d inquired into Romankov’s professional history, and there could be no denying that the man was an exceptionally gifted teacher. To have his daughter studying under that famous ballet master was an honor that touched Tamás Hász’s sense of bourgeois pride and confirmed his paternal prejudices.

Of the twenty children that comprised the Royal Ballet School’s beginning class, seventeen were girls and three were boys. One of the boys was a tall dark-haired child named Sándor Goldstein. He was the son of a carpenter and had a perpetual smell of fresh-cut wood about him. Romankov had discovered Sándor Goldstein not in a dance class but at the pool at Palatinus Strand, where Goldstein had been practicing acrobatic dives with a group of friends. At twelve years old he could do a handstand on the edge of the board and push himself off, then flip backward to enter the water headfirst. At his school he’d won the gymnastics medal three years in a row. When Romankov proposed taking him on as a student, Goldstein had denounced ballet as a pursuit for girls. Romankov had responded by engaging one of the male dancers of the Hungarian Royal Ballet to meet Goldstein on his way home from school, lift him overhead like a barbell, and run through the streets with him until Goldstein begged to be put down. The next day Goldstein enrolled in Romankov’s beginning class, and by the time he was thirteen and Klara twelve, they were both performing children’s roles with the Royal Ballet.

To Klara, Sándor was brother, friend, co-conspirator. He taught her to send Romankov into a fury by dancing half a beat behind the music. He introduced her to delicacies she’d never tried: the savory dry end of a Debrecen sausage; the crystalline scrapings of the sugared-nuts kettle, which could be bought for half a fillér at the end of the day; the tiny sour apples that were meant for jelly but that made for fine eating if you didn’t eat too many. And at the great market on Vámház körut he taught her how to steal. While Klara showed off pirouettes for the candy vendor, Sándor nicked a handful of peach-pit candy for both of them. He tipped tiny Russian dolls into his cap, looped embroidered kerchiefs onto his smallest finger, plucked pastries from the market baskets of women haggling over fruit and vegetables. Klara invited him to lunch at her parents’ house, where he soon became a favorite. Her father talked to him as though he were a full-grown gentleman, her mother fed him pink-iced chocolates, and her brother dressed him in a military jacket and taught him to shoot imaginary Serbs.

When they had both attained the necessary strength, Romankov made Klara and Sándor dancing partners. He taught Sándor to lift Klara with no sign of effort, to make her seem light as a reed. He taught them to become a single dancer in two bodies, to listen to the rhythm of each other’s breath, the flow of blood in each other’s veins. He made them study anatomy textbooks together and tested them on musculature and bone structure. He took them to see dissections at the medical school. Five times a week they performed with the Royal Ballet. By the time she was thirteen, Klara had been a moth, a sylph, a sugarplum, a member of a swan court, a lady-in-waiting, a mountain stream, a moonbeam, a doe. Her parents had resigned themselves to her appearing on the stage; her growing fame had earned them a certain prestige among their friends. When she turned fourteen and Sándor fifteen they began dancing principal roles, edging out dancers who were four and five years older. Great ballet masters from Paris and Petrograd and London came to see them. They danced for the dispossessed royalty of Europe and for the heirs of French and American fortunes. And amid the confusion of auditions and practices and costume fittings and performances, the inevitable happened: They fell in love.

A year later, in the spring of 1921, it came to the attention of Admiral Miklós Horthy that the star dancers of his kingless kingdom were two Jewish children who had been taught to dance by a White Russian émigré. Of course, no law forbade Jews from becoming dancers; no quota existed in the Royal Ballet Company to mirror the numerus clausus that kept Jews in universities and public positions to a reasonable six percent. But the matter offended Horthy’s sense of nationalism. Hungarian Jews might be Magyarized, but they were not really Hungarian. They might participate in the economic and civic life of the country, but they ought not stand as shining examples of Magyar achievement on the stages of the world. And that was what these children had been asked to do; that was why the minister of culture had brought the matter to Horthy’s attention. They’d been invited to perform in seventeen cities that spring, and had applied for the necessary visas.

Horthy couldn’t be troubled with the matter beyond forming the opinion that something ought to be done. He told the minister of culture to handle it as he saw fit. The minister of culture assigned the problem to an undersecretary who was known for his ambition and his unambiguous feelings toward Jews. This man, Madarász, lost no time in carrying out his assignment. First he forbade the visa office to grant exit passes to the two dancers. Then he assigned two police officers, known members of the right-wing Arrow Cross Party, to carry out a regular watch over the dancers’ comings and goings. Klara and Sándor never guessed that the policemen they saw every night in the alley had anything to do with the troubles they were having at the visa office; the men scarcely seemed to notice them. Usually the policemen were arguing. Invariably they were drunk: They had an army canteen they passed back and forth between them. No matter how late Klara and Sándor stayed at the Operaház-and sometimes they stayed until twelve thirty or one o’clock, because the theater was the only place where they could be alone-the men were always there. After a week or so of listening to their arguments, Sándor learned their names: Lajos was the tall block-jawed one; Gáspár was the one who looked like a bulldog. Sándor got into the habit of waving to them in greeting. The policemen never waved back, of course; they would give stony stares as Klara and Sándor passed.

A month went by and the men were still there, their presence as much a mystery as ever. But by that time they’d come to seem part of the neighborhood furniture, the fabric of Sándor and Klara’s everyday lives. The situation might have gone on indefinitely, or at least until the Ministry of Culture had lost interest, had not the policemen themselves tired of their endless watch. Boredom and drink made their silence oppressive. They started calling out to Klara and Sándor: Hey, lovers. Hey, darlings. How does she taste? Can we have some? Do dancer boys have anything down there? Does he know what to do with it, sugar? Sándor would take Klara’s arm and hurry her along, but she could feel him shaking with anger as the men’s taunts followed them down the street.

One night the man called Gáspár approached them, stinking of cigarettes and liquor. Klara remembered thinking that the leather strap across his chest looked like the kind of strap teachers used to beat unruly children at school. He drew his baton from its holster and tapped it against his leg.

“What are you waiting for?” the man called Lajos goaded him.

Gáspár took the baton and slipped it under the hem of Klara’s dress; in one swift motion he raised the hem as high as her head, exposing her to the waist for an instant.

“There you go,” called Gáspár to Lajos. “Now you’ve seen it.”

Before Klara knew what was happening, Sándor had stepped forward and grabbed the free end of the baton; as he tried to twist it away, the officer held fast to the other end. Sándor kicked the man in the knee, making him howl in pain. The officer wrenched the baton away and struck Sándor in the head. Sándor fell to his knees. He raised his arms, and the officer began to kick him in the stomach. For a moment Klara was caught in a paralysis of horror; she couldn’t understand what was happening or why. She screamed for the man to stop, she tried to pull him off Sándor. But the other officer, Lajos, caught her by the arm and wrenched her away. He dragged her into a recess of the alley, where he forced her down onto the paving stones and pushed her skirt up around her waist. He stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth, put a gun under her chin, and did what he did to her.

The pain of it had a kind of clarifying power. She scuttled her fingers across the pavement, looking for what she knew was there: the baton, cold and smooth against the cobblestones. He’d dropped it when he’d bent to unbutton his pants. Now she closed her hand around it and struck him in the temple. When he yelped and put a hand to his head, she kicked him in the chest as hard as she could. He reeled back against the opposite wall of the alcove, hit his head against the base of the wall, and went still. At that moment, from the alley where Sándor and the officer had been struggling, there came a sharp percussive crack. The sound seemed to fly into Klara’s brain and explode outward.

Then a terrible silence.

She got to her knees and crawled out of the alcove, toward the place where one male form crouched over another. Sándor lay on his back with his eyes open toward the sky. The bulldog-faced officer knelt beside him, one hand on Sándor’s chest. The officer was crying, telling the boy to get up, damn him, get up. He called the boy a rotten piece of filth. His hand came away from Sándor’s chest covered in blood. From the pavement he retrieved the gun he’d dropped and turned it upon Klara; its barrel caught the light and quavered in the dim cave of the alley. Klara edged back into the alcove where the first officer lay. She went to her knees, searching for the man’s revolver; she’d heard it clatter to the pavement when she’d knocked him away. There it was, cold and heavy on the ground. She picked it up in one hand and tried to hold it still against her leg. The officer who had shot Sándor advanced toward her, weeping. If she hadn’t seen him holding the gun a moment earlier, he might have seemed to be approaching her in supplication. Now she looked at Sándor on the ground and felt the weight of the weapon in her own hand, the same gun that the officer called Lajos had pushed against the hollow of her throat. She raised it and held it steady.

A second explosion. The man stumbled back and fell; afterward, a deep stillness.

It was the ache of the recoil in her shoulder that made her know that it had happened: She had fired the gun, had shot a man. From Andrássy út came a woman’s shout. Farther away, a siren sent up its two-note howl. She came out of the alcove with the gun in her hand and approached the officer she had shot. He had fallen backward onto the pavement, one arm flung over his head. From the alcove came a groan and a word she couldn’t understand. The other officer had gotten to his hands and knees. He saw the revolver in her hand and the man dead on the street. In three days he himself would be dead of his head injury, but not before he’d revealed the identity of his partner’s killer and his own. The distant sirens grew closer; Klara dropped the gun and ran.

She had killed one officer and fatally wounded another. Those were the facts. That she had been raped by one of those officers could never be proved in court. All the witnesses were dead, and within days Klara’s bruises and abrasions had disappeared. By that time, at the urging of her father’s lawyer, she’d been spirited over the border into Austria, and from there into Germany, and from Germany into France. The city of Paris would be her refuge, the famed ballet teacher Olga Nevitskaya, a cousin of Romankov’s, her protector. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. She would live at Nevitskaya’s only as long as it took her parents to determine who might be bribed, or how her safety might otherwise be guaranteed. But before two weeks had passed, the peril of Klara’s situation became clear. She had been accused of murder. The gravity of the crime assured that she would be tried as an adult. Her father’s lawyer believed there could be no guarantee of success in an argument of self-defense; the police had determined that the man she’d killed had been unarmed when she’d shot him. Of course he’d had a gun; he’d shot Sándor with it a few moments earlier. But the other officer, the one who had witnessed the shooting, had testified that his partner had dropped the gun before he had approached Klara. The testimony had been confirmed by material evidence: the gun had been found beside Sándor’s body, ten feet away from the fallen officer.

To make matters worse, it turned out that the man Klara had shot had been a war hero. He had saved fifteen members of his company in the battle of Kovel, had received an official commendation from the Emperor. And if that were not enough to turn any judge’s favor against Klara, it emerged-or the police claimed-that the right-wing members of their department had recently received threatening messages from Gesher Zahav, a Zionist organization to which Klara and Sándor had been linked. Three times in the past month the dancers had been seen coming and going from the organization’s headquarters on Dohány utca; never mind that what they’d been doing was attending Sunday night dances, not plotting the murder of police operatives. The fact that Klara had disappeared was considered to be a confirmation of her guilt, of her position as an instrument of Gesher Zahav’s plot. News of it was all over town; every paper in Budapest had run a front-page article about the young Jewish dancer who had murdered a war hero. And that was the end of Klara’s parents’ hopes to bring her home. It was a lucky thing, her father’s lawyer wrote, that they’d managed to get her out of the country when they had. If she’d stayed, there would have been another bloodbath.

For the first two months of her time at Madame Nevitskaya’s, Klara lay in a tiny dark room that looked out onto an airshaft. Every piece of bad news from Budapest seemed to push her farther toward the bottom of a well. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t stand to have anyone touch her. Sándor was dead. She would never see her parents or her brother again. Would never go home to Budapest. Would never again live in a place where everyone she passed on the street spoke Hungarian. Would never skate in the Városliget or dance on the stage of the Operaház, would never see any of her friends from school or eat a cone of chestnut paste as she walked the Danube strand on Margaret Island. Would never see any of the pretty things in her room, her leather-bound diaries and Herend vases and embroidered pillows, her Russian nesting dolls, her little menagerie of glass animals. She had even lost her name, would never again be Klara Hász; she would forever be Claire Morgenstern, a name chosen for her by a lawyer. Every morning she woke to face the knowledge that it had all really happened, that she was a fugitive here at Madame Nevitskaya’s in France. It seemed to have made her physically ill. She spent the first hours of each day hunched over a basin, vomiting and dry-heaving. Every time she stood she thought she would faint. One morning Madame Nevitskaya came into Klara’s room and asked a series of mysterious-seeming questions. Did her breasts hurt? Did the smell of food make her sick? When was the last time she had bled? Later that day a doctor came and performed a painful and humiliating examination, after which he confirmed what Madame Nevitskaya had suspected: Klara was pregnant.

For three days all she could do was stare at the dart of sky she could see from her bed. Clouds passed across it; a vee of brown birds flew through it; in the evening it darkened to indigo and then filled with the gold-shot black of Paris night. She watched it as Nevitskaya’s maid, Masha, fed her chicken broth and bathed her forehead. She watched it as Nevitskaya explained that there was no need for Klara to endure the torture of carrying that man’s child. The doctor could perform a simple operation after which Klara would no longer be pregnant. After Nevitskaya left her alone to contemplate her fate, she stared and stared at that changeable dart of sky, scarcely able to comprehend what she had learned. Pregnant. A simple operation. But Madame Nevitskaya didn’t know the whole story; she and Sándor had been lovers for six months before he’d been killed. They had made love the very night of the attack. They had taken precautions, but she knew those precautions didn’t always work. If she was pregnant, it was just as likely that the child was his.

The thought was enough to get her out of bed. She told Madame Nevitskaya that she wouldn’t have an operation, and why. Madame Nevitskaya, a stern, glossy-haired woman of fifty, took Klara in her arms and began to weep; she understood, she said, and would not try to dissuade her. Klara’s parents, informed of her pregnancy and her plans, felt otherwise. They couldn’t abide the idea that she might find herself raising that other person’s child. In fact, her father was so strongly opposed to the idea that he threatened to cut Klara off altogether if she kept the child. What would she do, alone in Paris? She couldn’t dance, not when she was pregnant, and not with an infant to care for; how would she support herself? Wasn’t her situation difficult enough already?

But Klara had made up her mind. She would not have that operation, nor would she give up the baby after she’d carried it. Once it had occurred to her that the child might be Sándor’s, the idea began to take on the weight of a certainty. Let her father cut her off. She would work; she knew what she could do. She went to Madame Nevitskaya and begged to be allowed to teach a few classes of beginning students. She could do it until her pregnancy showed, and she could do it once she’d recovered from the birth. If Nevitskaya would have her as an instructor, it would save her life and the child’s.

Nevitskaya would. She gave Klara a class of seven-year-olds and bought her the black practice dress worn by all the teachers at the school. And soon Klara began to live again. Her appetite came back and she gained weight. Her dizziness disappeared. She found she could sleep at night. Sándor’s child, she thought; not that other’s. She went to a barber shop and got her hair cut short. She bought a sack dress of the kind that was fashionable then, a dress she could wear until late in the pregnancy. She bought a new leather-bound diary. Every day she went to the ballet school and taught her class of twenty little girls. When she couldn’t teach anymore, she begged Masha to let her help with the work around the house. Masha showed her how to clean, how to cook, how to wash; she taught her to navigate the market and the shops. When, in her sixth month, Klara noticed the vendors glancing at her belly and at her bare left hand, she bought a brass band she wore on her third finger like a wedding ring. She bought it as a convenience, but after a time it came to seem as though it really were a wedding ring; she began to feel as if she were married to Sándor Goldstein.

As her ninth month approached, she began to have vivid dreams about Sándor. Not the nightmares she’d had in her first weeks in Paris-Sándor lying in the alley, his eyes open to the sky-but dreams in which they were doing ordinary things together, working on a difficult lift or arguing over the answer to some arithmetic problem or wrestling in the cloakroom of the Operaház. In one dream he was thirteen, stealing sweets with her at the market. In another he was younger still, a thin-armed boy teaching her to dive at Palatinus Strand. She thought of him when the first contractions came on; she thought of him when the water rushed out of her. It was Sándor she cried for when the pain grew long and deep inside her, a white-hot stream of fire threatening to cleave her. When she woke after the cesarean she put out her arms to receive his child.

But it wasn’t his child at all, of course. It was Elisabet.

When she’d finished her story they sat silent by the fire, Andras on the footstool and Klara in the vermilion chair, her feet tucked under her skirt. The tea had grown cold in their cups. Outside, a hard wind had begun to rattle the trees. Andras got up and went to the window, looked down at the entrance of the Collège de France, at its ragged lace collar of clochards.

“Zoltán Novak knows about this,” Andras said.

“He knows the basic facts. He’s the only one in France who does. Madame Nevitskaya died some time ago.”

“You told him so he’d understand why you couldn’t love him.”

“We were very close, Zoltán and I. I wanted him to know.”

“Not even Elisabet knows,” Andras said, smoothing the rim of his cup with his thumb. “She believes she’s the child of someone you loved.”

“Yes,” Klara said. “It couldn’t have helped her to know the truth.”

“And now you’ve told me. You’ve told me so I’d understand what happened at Nice. You fell in love once, with Sándor Goldstein, and you can’t love anyone else. Madame Gérard guessed as much-she told me a long time ago that you were in love with a man who’d died.”

Klara gave a quiet sigh. “I did love Sándor,” she said. “I adored him. But it’s romantic nonsense to suggest that what I felt for him would keep me from falling in love again.”

“What happened at Nice, then?” Andras said. “What made you turn away?”

She shook her head and put her cheek into her hand. “I was frightened, I suppose. I saw what it might be like to have a life with you. For the first time that seemed possible. But there were all the terrible things I hadn’t told you. You didn’t know I had shot and killed a man, or that I was a fugitive from justice. You didn’t know I’d been raped. You didn’t know how damaged I was.”

“How could it have done anything but make me feel closer to you?”

She came to stand beside him at the window, her face flushed and damp, raw-looking in the dim light. “You’re a young man,” she said. “You can love someone whose life is simple. You don’t need any of this. I was certain you’d see the situation that way as soon as I told you. I was certain I’d seem a ruin of a person.”

Last December she’d stood in just the same place with a cup of tea shivering in her hands. You have some too, she’d said, offering the cup. Te.

“Klara,” he said. “You’re mistaken. I wouldn’t trade your complication for anyone else’s simplicity. Do you understand?”

She raised her eyes to him. “It’s difficult to believe.”

“Try,” he said, and drew her close so he could breathe the warm scent of her scalp, the darkness of her hair. Here in his arms was the girl who had lived in the house near the Városliget, the young dancer who had loved Sándor Goldstein, the woman who loved him now. He could almost see inside her that unnameable thing that had remained the same through all of it: her I, her very life. It seemed so small, a mustard seed with one rootlet shot deep into the earth, strong and fragile at once. But it was all there needed to be. It was everything. She had given it to him, and now he held it in his hands.

They spent that night together on the rue des Écoles. In the morning they washed and dressed in the blue chill of Andras’s room, and then walked together to the rue de Sévigné. It was the seventh of November, a cold gray morning feathered with frost. Andras went inside with her to light the coal stove in the studio. He hadn’t entered that place, her own place, for two months. It was quiet in the expectant way of classrooms; it smelled of ballet shoes and rosin, like the Budapest studio she’d described. In a corner stood the drawing table she had given him for his birthday, draped to keep out the dust. She went to it and pulled the sheet free.

“I’ve kept it, just as you asked,” she said.

Andras took the sheet from her and wrapped it around them both. He drew her so close he could feel her hipbones hard against his own, her ribcage pressing against his ribcage as they breathed. He draped the end of the sheet over their heads so they stood shrouded together in a corner of the studio. In the white privacy of that tent he lifted her chin with one finger and kissed her. She drew the sheet tighter around them.

“Let’s never come out,” he said. “Let’s stay here always.”

He bent to kiss her again, full of the certainty that nothing could make him move from that place-not hunger, nor exhaustion, nor pain, nor fear, nor war.

CHAPTER TWENTY. A Dead Man

THE NEWS CAME to Andras at studio. Though he was half blind with exhaustion after his night with Klara, he had to go to school; he had a critique that day. It was an emulation project: he’d had to design a single-use space in the style of a contemporary architect. He had designed an architecture studio after Pierre Charreau, modeling it upon the doctor’s house on the rue Saint-Guillaume: a three-level building composed of glass block and steel, flooded with diffuse light all day and glowing from inside at night. Everyone had arrived early to pin their designs to the walls; once Andras had found a place for his drawings, he took a stool from his worktable and sat with the older students around a paint-spattered radio. They were listening to the news, expecting nothing but the usual panchromium of worries.

It was Rosen who caught it first; he turned up the volume so everyone could hear. The German ambassador had just been shot. No, not the ambassador, an embassy official. A secretary of legation, whatever that was. Ernst Eduard vom Rath. Twenty-nine years old. He’d been shot by a child. A child? That couldn’t be right. A youngster. A boy of seventeen. A Jewish boy. A German-Jewish boy of Polish extraction. He had shot the official to avenge the deportation of twelve thousand Jews from Germany.

“Oh, God,” Ben Yakov said, pulling his hands through his pomaded hair. “He’s a dead man.”

Everyone crowded closer. Had the embassy official been killed, or was he still alive? The answer came a moment later: He had been shot four times in the abdomen; he was undergoing surgery at the Alma Clinic on rue de l’Université, not ten minutes from the École Spéciale. It was rumored that Hitler was sending his personal physician from Berlin, along with the director of the Surgical Clinic of the University of Munich. The assailant, Gruenspan or Grinspun, was being held at an undisclosed location.

“Sending his personal physician!” Rosen said. “I’m sure he is. Sending him with a nice big capsule of arsenic for their man.”

“What do you mean?” someone demanded.

“Vom Rath has to die for Germany,” Rosen said. “Once he does, they can do whatever they want to the Jews.”

“They’d never kill their own man.”

“Of course they would.”

“They won’t have to,” another student said. “The man’s been shot four times.”

Polaner had stepped away from the crowd near the radio and had gone to smoke a cigarette by the window. Andras went over and looked down into the courtyard, where two fifth-year students were hanging a complicated wooden mobile from a tree. Polaner cracked the window open and blew a line of smoke out into the chilly air.

“I knew him,” he said. “Not the Jewish boy. The other.”

“Vom Rath?” Andras said. “How?”

Polaner glanced up at Andras and then looked away. He tapped his ash onto the windowsill outside, where it circled for a moment and then scattered. “There’s a certain bar I used to go to,” Polaner said. “He used to go, too.”

Andras nodded in silence.

“Shot,” Polaner said. “By a seventeen-year-old Jewish kid. Vom Rath, of all people.”

Vago came in at that moment and turned off the radio, and everyone began to take their seats for the brief lecture he’d give before the critique. Andras sat on his wooden stool only half listening, scratching a box into the surface of the studio desk with the metal clip of his pencil. It was all too much, what Klara had told him the night before and what had happened at the German Embassy. In his mind they became one: Klara and the Polish-German teenager, both violated, both holding guns in trembling hands, both firing, both condemned. Nazi doctors hastened toward Paris to save or kill a man. And the Polish-German boy was in jail somewhere, waiting to learn if he was a murderer or not. Andras’s drawing had slipped one of its pins and hung askew from the wall. He looked at it and thought, That’s right. At that moment, everything seemed to hang at an angle by a single pin: not just houses, but whole cities, countries, peoples. He wished he could quiet the din in his mind. He wanted to be in the smooth white bed at Klara’s house, in her white bedroom, in the sheets that smelled like her body. But there was Vago now, taking Andras’s drawing by its corner and repinning it to the wall. There was the class gathering around. It was time for his critique. He made himself get up from the table and stand beside his drawing while they discussed it. It was only afterward, when everyone was patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand, that he realized it had been a success.

“Vom Rath didn’t hate the Jews,” Polaner said. “He was a Party member, of course, but he loathed what was going on in Germany. That’s why he came to France: He wanted to get away. At least that was what he told me.”

Two days had passed; Ernst vom Rath had died that afternoon at the Alma Clinic. Hitler’s doctors had come, but they had deferred to the French doctors. According to the evening news broadcast, vom Rath had died of complications from damage to his spleen. A ceremony would be held at the German Lutheran Church that Saturday.

Andras and Polaner had gone to the Blue Dove for a glass of whiskey, but they’d discovered they were short on cash. It was the end of the month; not even the pooled contents of their pockets would buy a single drink. So they told the waiter they would order in a few minutes, and then they sat talking, hoping they could pass half an hour in that warm room before they’d be asked to leave. After a while the waiter brought their usual whiskey and water. When they protested that they couldn’t pay, the waiter twisted one end of his moustache and said, “Next time I’ll charge you double.”

“How did you meet him?” Andras asked Polaner.

Polaner shrugged. “Someone introduced us. He bought me a drink. We talked. He was intelligent and well read. I liked him.”

“But when you learned who he was-”

“What would you have had me do?” Polaner said. “Walk away? Would you have wanted him to do the same to me?”

“But how could you sit there and speak to a Nazi? Especially after what happened last winter?”

“He didn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t have done it. I told you.”

“That’s what he said, at least. But he may have had other motives.”

“For God’s sake,” Polaner said. “Can’t you leave it alone? A man I knew just died. I’m trying to take it in. Isn’t that enough for now?”

“I’m sorry,” Andras said.

Polaner laid his folded hands on the table and rested his chin upon them. “Ben Yakov was right,” he said. “They’ll make an example of that boy. Grynszpan. They’ll have him extradited and then kill him in some spectacular way.”

“They can’t. The world is watching them.”

“All the better, as far as they’re concerned.”

…

Klara stood at the window with the newspaper in her hand, looking down into the rue de Sévigné. She had just read aloud a brief article about the actions the German government would take against the Jewish people in recompense for the catastrophic destruction of German property that resulted from the violence of 9 November. The newspapers were calling it the Night of Broken Glass. Andras walked up and down the length of the room, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. At the writing desk Elisabet opened a school notebook and scratched a series of figures with a pencil.

“A billion reichsmarks,” she said. “That’s the amount of the fine against the Jews. And there are half a million Jews in Germany. That means each person has to pay two thousand reichsmarks, including children.”

The logic was astounding. He had tried and failed to grasp it. Grynszpan had shot vom Rath; vom Rath had died; November 9, the Night of Broken Glass, was supposed to have been the German people’s natural reaction to the killing. Therefore the responsibility for the destruction of Jewish shops, and the burning of synagogues, and the ransacking of homes-to say nothing of the killing of ninety-one Jews and the arrest of thirty thousand more-lay with the Jews themselves, and so the Jews had to pay. In addition to the fines, all insurance payments for damaged property would go directly to the government. And now it was illegal for Jews to operate businesses in Germany. In Paris and New York and London there had been protests against the pogrom and its aftermath, but the French government had been strangely silent. Rosen said it was because von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, was supposed to visit Paris in December to sign a declaration of friendship between Germany and France. It all seemed a great ugly sham.

From downstairs came the flutter and clang of the afternoon mail arriving through the slot. Elisabet got to her feet so quickly she overturned the chair, sending it backward into the fire screen, then ran downstairs to get the letters.

“I used to have to bribe her with gingerbread to get the mail,” Klara said as she righted the desk chair. “Now she won’t let it sit for half a minute.”

Elisabet was a long time coming up again. When she reappeared, breathless and flushed, it was only to throw a few envelopes onto the writing desk before she ran off down the hall to her room. Klara sat at the desk and thumbed through the mail. One piece, a thin cream-colored envelope, seemed to catch her attention. She took her letter knife and opened it.

“It’s from Zoltán,” she said, and scanned the single page. Her eyebrows drew together and she read more closely. “He and Edith are leaving in three weeks. He’s writing to say goodbye.”

“Leaving for where?”

“Budapest,” she said. “This isn’t the first I’ve heard of it. Marcelle said she’d heard a rumor that they were leaving-she told me last week when I met her at the Tuileries. Zoltán’s been asked to manage the Royal Hungarian Opera. And Madame Novak wants to raise their child near her family.” She rolled her lips inward and pressed a hand against her mouth.

“Are you so unhappy to see him go, Klara?”

She shook her head. “Not for the reason you’re thinking. You know how I feel about Zoltán. He’s a dear friend to me, an old friend. And a good man. He employed you, after all, when the Bernhardt could scarcely afford it.” She went to sit beside Andras on the sofa and took his hand in her own. “But I’m not unhappy to see him go. I’m glad for him.”

“What’s the matter, then?”

“I’m envious,” she said. “Terribly so. He and Edith can get on a train and go home. They can take the baby home to Edith’s mother, to raise it with its cousins.” She smoothed her gray skirt over her knees. “That pogrom in Germany,” she said. “What if such a thing were to happen in Hungary? What if they were to arrest my brother? What would become of my mother?”

“If anything were to happen in Hungary, I could go to Budapest and see about your mother.”

“But I couldn’t go with you.”

“Perhaps we could find a way to bring your mother to France.”

“Even if we could, it would only be a temporary solution,” she said. “To our larger problem, I mean.”

“What larger problem?”

“You know the one. The problem of where we might live together. In the longer term, I mean. You know I can’t go home to Hungary, and you can’t stay here.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Your family,” she said. “What if there’s a war? You’d want to go home to them. I’ve thought about it a hundred times. You must know I thought about it a great deal in September. It was one of the reasons I couldn’t bring myself to write to you. I couldn’t see a way around it. I knew that if we decided to be together, I’d be keeping you from your family.”

“If I stay here it’ll be my own decision,” Andras said. “But if I have to go, I’ll find a way to bring you with me. We’ll see a lawyer. Isn’t there some statute of limitations?”

She shook her head. “I can still be arrested and tried for what I did. And even if I could go home, I couldn’t leave Elisabet.”

“Of course not,” Andras said. “But Elisabet has plans of her own.”

“Yes, that’s just what I fear. She’s still a child, Andras. She wears that engagement ring, but she doesn’t really understand what it means.”

“Her fiancé seems utterly sincere. I know he has the best intentions.”

“If that were the case, he might have consulted his parents before he started filling her head with ideas about marriage and America! He still hasn’t told them he’s engaged. Apparently they’ve got a girl in mind for him already, some beer heiress from Wisconsin. He’s got no attachment to her, he says, but I’m not certain his parents will see it that way. At the very least, he might have thought to ask my permission before he gave Elisabet that ring.”

Andras smiled. “Is that how it’s done? Do young men still ask permission?”

She surrendered a smile in return. “Good young men,” she said.

And then he drew closer and bent to her ear. “I’d like to ask someone’s permission, Klara,” he said. “I’d like to write a letter to your mother.”

“And what if she says no?” she whispered back.

“Then we’d have to elope.”

“But to where, darling?”

“I don’t care,” he said, looking deep into the gray landscape of her eyes. “I want to be with you. That’s all. I know it’s impractical.”

“It’s entirely impractical,” she said. But she put her arms around his neck and raised her face to him, and he kissed her closed eyes, tasting a trace of salt. At that moment they heard Elisabet’s step in the hallway; she appeared in the doorway of the sitting room in her green wool hat and coat. Andras and Klara drew away from each other and got to their feet.

“Pardon me, disgusting adults,” Elisabet said. “I’m going to the movies.”

“Listen, Elisabet,” Andras said. “What if I were to marry your mother?”

“Please,” Klara said, raising a hand in caution. “This isn’t the way we should talk about it.”

Elisabet tilted her head at Andras. “What did you say?”

“Marry her,” Andras said. “Make her my wife.”

“Do you mean that?” Elisabet said. “You want to marry her?”

“I do.”

“And she’ll have you?”

A long moment passed during which Andras experienced terrible suspense. But then Klara took his hand in her own and pressed it, almost as though she were in pain. “He knows what I want,” she said. “We want the same thing.”

Andras let out a breath. A flash flood of relief washed over Elisabet’s features; her perpetually knotted forehead went smooth. She crossed the room and put her arms around Andras, then kissed her mother. “It’s splendid,” she said, with plain sincerity. Without another word she flung her purse over her shoulder and clattered down the stairs.

“Splendid?” Klara said, in the reverberating silence that always followed Elisabet’s departures. “I’m not certain what I was expecting, but that wasn’t it.”

“She thinks it’ll make things easier for her and Paul.”

Klara sighed. “I know. If I marry you, she won’t have to feel guilty about leaving me.”

“We’ll wait, then, if you think it’ll make a difference. We’ll wait until she’s finished with school.”

“That’s another seven months.”

“Seven months,” he said. “But then we’ll have the rest of our lives.”

She nodded and took his hand. “Seven months.”

“Klara,” he said. “Klara Morgenstern. Have you just agreed to marry me?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. When Elisabet’s done with school. But that doesn’t mean I’m letting her run off to America with that smooth-talking young man.”

“Seven months,” he said.

“And perhaps by then we’ll solve our geographic problem.”

He held her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyelids. “Let’s not worry about that now,” he said. “Promise me you won’t think about it.”

“I can’t promise that, Andras. We’ll have to think about it if we’re to solve it.”

“We’ll think about it later. Now I want to kiss you. May I?”

In answer she put her arms around him, and he kissed her, wishing he had nothing else to do all day, all year, all his life. Then he pulled away and said, “I’m unprepared for this. I don’t have anything for you. I don’t have a ring.”

“A ring!” she said. “I don’t want a ring.”

“You’ll have one, though. I’ll see to it. And I wasn’t speaking lightly when I said I wanted to write to your mother.”

“That’s a tricky business, as you know.”

“I wish we could speak to József,” Andras said. “He could write to her, or enclose a letter from me inside one of his own.”

Klara pulled her lips together. “From what you’ve told me about his life, it hasn’t come to seem any wiser to involve him in our situation.”

“If we’re to be married, he’ll have to know sometime. The Latin Quarter is a small place.”

She sighed. “I know. It’s rather complicated.” She went back to the sofa and opened the folded newspaper. “At least we’ve got some time to think about it. Seven months,” she said. “Who knows what will happen by then? Shouldn’t we all just get married at once? Shouldn’t I be glad that my child might go across the ocean to America? If there’s a war, she’ll be safer there.”

That elusive ghost, safety. It had fled Hungary, had fled the halls of the École Spéciale, had fled Germany long before November 9. But as he sat down beside her and looked at the newspaper on her lap, he tasted the shock of it all over again. He followed the line of her hand to the front-page photograph: a man and woman in their nightclothes, standing in the street; a little boy between them, clutching what looked to be a Punch doll with a cone-shaped hat; and before them, shedding its violent light on them, a house on fire from its doorstep to its rafters. In the places where the fire had burned away carpets and flooring, wallpaper and plaster, he could see the structure of the house illuminated like the stripped bones of an animal. And he saw what an architect might see, what the man and woman and boy could not have seen as they stood in the street at that moment: that the main supports had already burned through, and in another moment the structure would fall in upon itself like a poorly built model, its beams crumbling to ash.