IN EARLY DECEMBER, Madame Gérard threw a party for her own birthday. Klara received an invitation on a heavy ivory-colored card printed with gold ink; Andras was invited as her guest. The night of the party he put on an immaculate white shirt and a black silk tie, sprinkled and brushed his best dinner jacket, and polished the shoes Tibor had brought him the year before from Budapest. He told himself that there was nothing extraordinary about the fact that Marcelle had invited him; in fact, though, this was to be the first time he had seen her since her departure from the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, and the first time he would appear in public as Klara’s future husband, among people who might consider him her inferior. What he feared was not just what her friends might think of him but what she might think, seeing him for the first time among the members of her circle. Those choreographers, those dancers, those composers who sometimes made her gifts of their music: How could he appear in comparison to them except as a novice, an aspirant, a perhaps-someday-but-not-yet? He wondered if that was the effect Marcelle had intended. But Klara herself distracted him from his concerns; when he arrived at the rue de Sévigné that night her manner was light and intimate. They walked the chilly boulevards toward Marcelle’s new apartment in the Eleventh, through streets that smelled of woodsmoke and approaching cold. It was difficult to believe it was nearly December, a year since they’d first met. Soon the skating ponds in the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne would be frozen solid once again.
At Madame Gérard’s they were received by a girl in a crisp white apron who took their coats and ushered them into a parquet-floored drawing room. The building belonged to the Belle Époque, but Madame Gérard had decorated her new apartment in the modern style: in the drawing room there were low black leather sofas and African masks and vases of veined malachite on glass shelves. Grass-green draperies hung at the windows, and two steel tables stood at attention beside the sofas like slim-legged greyhounds. On the tables were a pair of Brancusis, two tense flames of black marble. All of it was the fruit of her recent success; she had conquered Paris in every role she’d played since The Mother, and had just received a series of enthusiastic reviews for her Antigone at the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, where Andras and Forestier had installed an elaborate surrealist set. Now Madame Gérard herself, dressed in a chartreuse silk gown, crossed the drawing room to welcome Andras and Klara. She kissed them both, and after they’d exchanged their greetings she led Andras to a black lacquered console table where drinks were being served.
“Look how you’ve turned out,” she said, and touched his lapel. “A gentleman after all. Evening dress suits you. I may have a terrible fit of jealousy before the night is over.”
“It was kind of you to invite me,” Andras said. He heard the forced calm in his own voice, and he thought he saw the hint of a smile at the corner of Madame Gérard’s mouth.
“It was kind of you to indulge me on my birthday,” she said. And then, more pointedly: “You’ll enjoy the company, I believe. Our friend Monsieur Novak is here with his wife. Have you heard they’re to return to Hungary?” She tilted her head toward a corner of the room, where Novak and his wife stood talking to a silver-haired man in a cravat. “I must say, he reacted with some surprise when I told him you and Klara would be here. I imagine you must know all about…?”
“Yes, I know all about,” he said. “Though I’m sure you’d rather I hadn’t. It would have entertained you, wouldn’t it, to have been able to tell me yourself.”
“I’ve only ever looked out for your well-being,” Madame Gérard said. “I warned you about getting involved with Klara. I must say I was astonished to hear that things had become so serious between you. I was certain she viewed you as a kind of entertainment.”
Andras felt the heat rising beneath his skin. “And is this your idea of an entertainment?” he said. “To invite people to your house and then insult them?”
“Lower your voice, darling,” Madame Gérard said. “You attribute too much cleverness to me. How is one to keep straight everyone else’s romantic intrigues? If I’d invited only those of my friends whose connections were uncomplicated, I couldn’t have invited anyone at all!”
“I know you better than that,” Andras said. “I don’t think you do anything by mistake.”
“Well, I can see you’ve got me thoroughly romanticized,” she said, obviously pleased. “What a charming young man you are.”
“And when exactly does Monsieur Novak depart for Hungary?” he asked.
She gave her low dissonant laugh. “January,” she said. “I can’t imagine you’ll be sad to see him go. Though I’m not certain how Klara will take it. They were very close, you understand.” She handed him a glass of whiskey with ice, and turned her head toward Klara, who had taken a seat beside Novak on a low black sofa. “You mustn’t worry what people will say about the two of you, by the way-about your engagement, I mean. Everyone loves Klara’s eccentricities. I find the situation irresistible myself. It’s like a fairy tale! Look at you. She’s turned you from a frog into a prince.”
“If that’s all,” he said, “I’ll bring Klara a drink.”
“You’d better,” Madame Gérard said. “In another moment he’ll be obliged to get one for her.” She turned her gaze again to the low black sofa, where Novak was explaining something to Klara in urgent tones. Klara shook her head, smiling sadly; Novak seemed to press his point, and Klara lowered her eyes.
Andras got her a glass of wine and made his way through a cluster of dinner guests in evening dress; he brushed past Novak’s wife, Edith, a tall, dark-haired woman in a velvet gown, redolent of jasmine perfume. The last time he’d seen her, almost a year earlier at the Sarah-Bernhardt, she’d handed him her bag while she searched her pockets for a handkerchief. She’d given him no more regard than if he’d been a hook on the wall. Now she held her back rigid while another women leaned close to her ear; it was clear that the other woman was narrating the progression of Novak’s tête-à-tête with Klara. When Andras reached the sofa, Monsieur Novak got to his feet and held out a damp red hand for Andras to shake. His eyes were raw, his breathing labored. After his first words of greeting he seemed unable to introduce a subject of conversation.
“I understand you’re going home to Budapest,” Andras said.
Novak smiled with obvious effort. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “And what will I do this time for a lunchtime companion? Madame Novak prefers the dining car.”
“You’ll probably cheer up some young fool on his way from Paris to Budapest.”
“Fool indeed, if he’s young and heading back to Budapest.”
“ Budapest is a fine place for a young man,” Andras said.
“Perhaps you ought to have stayed there, then,” Novak said, leaning a shade too close to Andras; in an instant Andras knew he was drunk. By now Klara knew, too, of course; she stood and placed a hand on Novak’s sleeve. A flash of resentment kindled in Andras’s chest. If Novak was going to undo himself, Klara shouldn’t feel under an obligation to protect him. But she gave Andras a look that begged forbearance, and he had to relent. He couldn’t fault Novak. It had been only three months, after all, since his own bout of drunken howling at József Hász’s flat.
“Monsieur Novak was telling me about his new position with the Royal Hungarian Opera,” Klara said.
“Ah, yes. They’re lucky to have you,” Andras said.
“Well, Paris won’t miss me,” Novak said, looking pointedly at Klara. “That much is evident.”
Madame Gérard had crossed the room to join their group, and she took Novak’s hands in her own. “We shall all miss you terribly,” she said. “It’s a great loss to us. A great loss to me. What will I do without you? Who will preside at my dinner parties?”
“You will preside, as always,” Novak said.
“Not ‘as always,’” she said. “I used to be morbidly shy. You used to do all the talking for me. But perhaps you don’t remember that. Perhaps you don’t remember how you were forced to ply me with wine in your office, just to convince me to take Madame Villareal-Bloch’s role.”
“Ah, yes, poor Claudine,” Novak said, his voice rising in volume as he spoke. “She was brilliant, and she threw it all away for that boy. That press attaché from Brazil. She followed him to São Paolo, and then he dropped her for a young tart.” He turned a glare upon Andras. “And she was so certain he loved her. But he made a fool of her.” He drained his glass, then went toward the window and stared down into the street.
A wave of silence spread from Novak to the rest of the guests; conversation faltered in one small group after another. It seemed they’d all been watching the exchange between Andras and Klara and Novak; it was almost as though they’d been notified of the situation in advance, and advised to pay particular attention. At last an elderly woman in a black Mainbocher gown cleared her throat delicately, fortified herself with a sip of gin, and declared that she had just heard that the forty thousand railroad workers fired by Monsieur Reynaud would stage a protest, and that the only good that might come of it would be that Monsieur and Madame Novak’s departure might be delayed.
“Oh, but that would be terrible,” said Madame Novak. “Mother is giving a party to welcome us, and the invitations have already been sent.”
Madame Gérard laughed. “No one could ever accuse you of being a populist, Edith,” she said, and the conversation soon resumed its former pace.
At dinner, Andras found himself seated between Madame Novak and the elderly woman in the Mainbocher gown. Andras found Madame Novak’s jasmine perfume so overpowering that it seemed to lace the flavor of every dish set before him; he ate jasmine terrapin soup, jasmine sorbet, jasmine pheasant. Klara was seated beside Novak down the table to Andras’s right, where it was impossible for him to see her face. The talk at the table was at first of Madame Gérard: her career and her new apartment and her enduring beauty. Marcelle listened with poorly acted modesty, her mouth slipping into a self-satisfied smile. When she’d grown bored of basking in flattery she turned the conversation to Budapest, its charms and difficulties and how it had changed since the Hungarians among them had lived there in their youth. She kept beginning her sentences by saying, “When we were Monsieur Lévi’s age.” A Captain Something-von-Other seated across from Andras declared that Europe would be at war before long, and that Hungary must be involved, and that Budapest would undergo profound changes before the decade closed. Madame Novak voiced the hope that the park where she’d played as a child would not be altered, at least; that was where she intended for her own child to play.
“Isn’t that right?” she asked her husband across the table. “I’ll have János’s nurse take him there as soon as we get to town.”
“Where, my dear?”
“The park on Pozsonyi út, at the river’s edge.”
“Of course,” said Novak absently, turning again to Klara.
The dinner concluded with cheeses and port, and the guests retired to a buff-walled room that held velvet settees and a Victrola. Madame Gérard demanded that they have dancing. The settees were moved aside, a record placed upon the Victrola, and the guests began swaying to a new American song, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Monsieur Novak took Klara by the waist and led her to the center of the room. They danced awkwardly, Klara with her hands braced against Novak’s arms, Novak trying to lower his head onto her shoulder. Madame Novak, willfully oblivious, danced a jerky jazz step with Captain Something-von-Other, and Andras found himself partnered with the elderly woman in black. The way you wear your hat, she sang into Andras’s ear. The way you sip your tea. The memory of all that-no, they can’t take that away from me.
“It’s about lost love!” she said, when he protested that his English was terrible. She seemed to think she had to shout into his ear in order to be heard above the music and conversation. “The man is parted from the woman, but he’ll never forget her! She haunts his dreams! She’s changed his life!”
No one could get enough of the song. Madame Gérard declared it her new favorite. They played it four times before they tired of it. Andras danced with Madame Gérard, and with Edith Novak, and with the elderly woman again; but Zoltán Novak would not release Klara. In a short time he would leave Paris forever; nothing could prevent that-not a rail strike, nor the threat of war, nor the force of his own love. Klara tried to extricate herself from his arms, but each time she pulled away he protested so loudly she had to stay with him to avoid a scene. Finally, too drunk to stand, he stumbled back onto a settee and wiped his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Madame Gérard took the record from the turntable and announced that the birthday cake would now be served, and Klara motioned Andras into a hallway.
“Let’s go,” she whispered. “We should never have come. I should have known Marcelle would arrange some horrible drama.”
He was only too eager to leave. They retrieved their coats from a red bedroom and slipped out into the hall. But Novak must have missed Klara, and then heard the lift descending; or perhaps he had just decided he couldn’t bear the heat of the room any longer. When they emerged onto the sidewalk he was there on the balcony, calling out to Klara as she and Andras walked arm in arm down the street. Andras, far from feeling any triumph, was sick with empathy. It seemed just as likely that he himself might have been the one she was leaving behind forever, the one who’d been sent back to Hungary without her, and the feeling was so strong he had to sit down on a bench and put his head between his knees. It was a fresh shock to feel her close beside him, her gloved hand on his shoulder. They sat there on the bench in the cold for what seemed a long time, neither of them speaking a word.
ON A DAY of knifelike December wind, the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme staged a protest against the German foreign minister’s visit to Paris. Andras and Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov stood in a tight group of demonstrators outside the Élysée Palace, shouting slogans of protest against the French and German governments, waving signs-NO FRIENDSHIP WITH FASCISTS; VON RIBBENTROP GO HOME-and singing the Zionist songs they’d learned at earlier meetings of the Ligue, which Rosen had insisted they all join after the pogrom in Germany. That morning he had woken them at dawn to paint placards. There could be no excuse for passivity, he said as he dragged them from their beds, no excuse for lying around while Joachim von Ribbentrop prepared to sign a nonaggression treaty with France; Bonnet, the French foreign minister who had been so accommodating about Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, had arranged it all. At Rosen’s they drank a pot of Turkish coffee and made a dozen signs, Rosen stirring the paint with a ruler and insisting they all breathe the fumes of revolution. Andras knew Rosen’s performance was largely for the benefit of his new copine, a Zionist nursing student whom he’d met that summer. The girl, Shalhevet, had joined them that morning to make the signs. She was tall and fierce-eyed, with a heartbreaking lock of white in her black hair; her occasional winks at Andras and Polaner and Ben Yakov suggested she knew how absurd Rosen could be, but she watched him with an admiration that betrayed her deeper feelings.
Though Andras had complained at being dragged from bed, he was glad to be called upon to do something more substantial than read the newspaper and lament its contents. As he stood outside the Élysée Palace holding his sign aloft, he thought of the young Grynszpan in Fresnes prison-what he must have been feeling at that moment, and whether or not he knew France was welcoming the German foreign minister that day. At noon, von Ribbentrop’s black limousine pulled up to the gates of the palace and was quickly ushered through. While the police watched warily and guarded the barricades around the palace, the Friendship Declaration was signed. There was nothing the protesters could have done to stop it from happening, but they’d made their feelings known. After the foreign minister had departed again, the Ligue marched all the way to the river, shouting and singing. And at the quai des Tuileries Andras and his friends broke away to end their afternoon at the Blue Dove, where the talk was not of politics but of their other favorite subject. Ben Yakov, it seemed, faced a terrible problem: Despite all his efforts, he’d only managed to save two thirds of the money he needed to bring his Florentine bride back to Paris -to steal her away, as Rosen said. And time was of the essence; they couldn’t wait any longer. In another month she would be married to the old goat to whom her parents had promised her.
Rosen knocked a fist against the table. “To arms, men,” he said. “At all costs, we must save girls from goats.”
Shalhevet agreed. “Yes, please,” she said. “Save girls from goats.”
“You people insist upon making a joke out of everything,” Ben Yakov said.
“It’s your own medicine, I’m afraid,” Polaner said.
“This is the most critical moment of my life,” Ben Yakov said. “I can’t lose Ilana. For four months I’ve been working like a dog to bring her here. Day and night, at school and at the library, trying to save every centime. I’ve thought about nothing but her. I’ve written her nearly every day. I’ve been as celibate as a monk.”
“Excuse me,” Rosen said. “What about the Carousel Dance Club last weekend? What were you doing there with Lucia if you’ve been celibate as a monk?”
“One lapse!” Ben Yakov said, raising his hands heavenward. “A farewell to bachelorhood.”
Andras shook his head. “You must know you’ll make a terrible husband,” he said. “You ought to wait a few years until your blood cools down.”
Ben Yakov frowned at his empty glass. “I’m in love with Ilana,” he said. “We can’t wait any longer. But I’m still missing a thousand francs. I can afford to get there and back, but I can’t afford her ticket.”
“What about your brother?” Polaner asked, turning to Andras. “Can he help?”
Tibor was coming to visit in three weeks; he would spend his winter holiday in Paris. He and Andras had been saving the money for months. Even Klara had contributed to Tibor’s ticket; she’d insisted that as Andras’s fiancée she had a right to do so. “I won’t let him give up his ticket,” Andras said. “Not even for Ben Yakov’s fiancée.”
“He wouldn’t have to give it up,” Rosen said. “Ben Yakov can afford to buy her ticket if he doesn’t have to get one of his own. And then Tibor could escort her. He would just have to get to Florence, that’s all.”
Ben Yakov rose from his chair. He put his hands to his head. “That’s brilliant,” he said. “My God. We could do it. It can’t cost much to get from Modena to Florence.”
“Wait a minute,” Andras said. “Tibor hasn’t agreed, and neither have I. How is this meant to work? He goes to Florence, and elopes with her in your place?”
“He’ll meet her at the train station and they’ll leave together,” Rosen said. “Isn’t that right, Ben Yakov? He would have to do nothing but show up in Florence.”
“But what about when she gets here?” Andras said. “She can’t just step off a train and marry you at once. Where will she stay before the wedding?”
Ben Yakov stared. “She’ll stay at my apartment, of course.”
“She’s an Orthodox girl, remember.”
“I’ll give her my room. I’ll come stay with one of you.”
“Not with me,” Rosen said, glancing sideways at Shalhevet.
“If Shalhevet is staying with you,” Ben Yakov said, “let Ilana stay at her place.”
“You can’t leave her all alone in a dormitory,” Shalhevet said. “She’ll be miserable.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Ben Yakov said.
“What about Klara?” Polaner asked. “Could Ilana stay with her?”
Andras set his chin on his hand. “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s preparing her students for their winter recital. It’s the busiest time of year.” And, though he didn’t say it aloud, there were aspects of the situation he knew Klara wouldn’t like. What business did they have importing a bride for Ben Yakov, their notorious scoundrel? The girl was running away from home to come to Paris; she had grown up in a close-knit Sephardic community in Florence, and was only nineteen years old. It was one thing to involve Tibor, but quite another to ask Klara to be an accomplice.
Polaner looked at Andras with concern. “What’s the matter?” he said.
“I’m not sure. Suddenly I find I’ve got doubts about all of this.”
“Please,” Ben Yakov said, putting a hand on Andras’s shoulder. “I’m begging you. Of all people, you have to understand my situation. You’ve struggled for the past year, and you’re happy now. Can’t you help me? I know I haven’t always acted like a gentleman, but you know how hard I’ve worked since I came back from Florence. I’ve done everything in my power to get that girl here.”
Andras gave a sigh and put a hand on Ben Yakov’s hand. “All right,” he said. “I’ll write to Tibor. And I’ll talk to Klara.”
…
12 December 1938
Modena, Italy
Andráska,
I consider it an honor to be asked to conduct the future Madame Ben Yakov to Paris. I’m glad to be of help to any friend of yours. I do feel for the girl’s parents, though. What will they think when they learn she’s gone? I hope Ben Yakov will reconcile with them as soon as he can. He may be just charming enough to pull it off. Please have him wire me Signorina di Sabato’s train information and I will meet her at the station in Firenze.
As for me, I’m more than ready to spend a few indolent weeks with you in your self-loving city. I’m exhausted. No one warns medical students that the course of study itself may produce any number of the diseases studied. I hope I may cure myself with sleep, wine, and your company.
Madame Morgenstern’s book of anatomy continues to serve me well. I’ll always be in debt to her for that gift. But please tell her not to make me any more such presents in the future! When my friends see that I own such a fine book, they overestimate my wealth and expect me to buy them dinner. At this rate I will soon be ruined entirely. In the meantime, I remain
your merely impoverished brother,
TIBOR
Andras brought the letter to Klara and asked for her help. Accompanying him was François Ben Yakov; it was the first time he had made Klara’s acquaintance. He had dressed for the occasion in a jacket of fine black wool and a red tie figured with barley-sized fleurs-de-lis. As Ben Yakov held Klara’s hands in his own and begged her understanding, meeting her gaze with his dark film-star eyes, Andras half-wondered if Klara might fall under the spell Ben Yakov seemed to cast upon every woman he met. She was enchanted enough to agree to help, at least; she allowed Ben Yakov to kiss her hand and to call her an angel. Once Ben Yakov had gone, leaving Andras and Klara alone, she laughed and said she could see why he caused such trouble among the young ladies of his acquaintance.
“I hope you won’t elope with him before the bride arrives,” Andras said. He pulled a chair close to the fire for her and they sat down to watch the coals burn low.
“Not a chance,” Klara said, and smiled. But then her expression grew serious, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “I share your brother’s reservation, though. I wish the girl didn’t have to run away. Would it really have been impossible for Ben Yakov to approach her father?”
“Would you allow your daughter to marry François Ben Yakov? Particularly if you’d raised her as an observant Jew? I’m afraid Ben Yakov was right when he came to the conclusion that they had to do it in secret.”
Klara sighed. “What will my own daughter think?”
“She’ll think she has a compassionate and understanding mother.”
“I understand too well,” Klara said. “So will Elisabet. This Florentine girl is restless, most likely. She wants a way out of the fate her parents have chosen for her. So she imagines herself to be in love with your friend. She must be very strong-willed if she’s ready to leave her family behind for his sake.”
“Strong-willed, indeed,” Andras said. “And in love. To hear him tell it, she wants to come more than anything. And he wants it too.”
“Do you think he can make her happy?”
Andras looked into the fire, at the heat swimming up through the coals. “He’ll do his best. He’s a good man.”
“I hope he does,” she said. “I hope he is.”
On the night of Tibor and Ilana’s arrival they all went to the station to meet the train. They stood in a group on the platform, Andras and Klara and Polaner, Rosen and Shalhevet, while Ben Yakov paced the platform a little distance away; in one clenched hand he held a nosegay of pansies for Signorina di Sabato. Pansies were a terrible extravagance in winter, but he’d insisted upon buying them. They were the flowers he’d given her when they first met.
It was Shalhevet who spotted the train, the speck of light far off down the line. They heard the throaty alto notes of the whistle; their group pressed forward with the rest of the Parisians who’d come to meet their holiday visitors. The train pulled in, letting off a skirt of steam, and the waiting crowd surged closer still as it came to a stop. After a maddeningly long time, the doors opened with their metallic clack and the gold-epauletted conductors jumped down onto the platform. Everyone took half a step back and waited.
Tibor was among the first to appear. Andras saw him at the door of one of the third-class cars, his expression anxious and weary; he held a pale green bandbox and a lady’s fancy umbrella. He moved aside to make way for a young girl with a long dark braid, who paused on the top step to cast a searching look over the crowd.
“It’s her,” Ben Yakov shouted over his shoulder to them. “It’s Ilana!” He called her name and waved the pansies. And the girl broke into an anxious smile so beautiful that Andras nearly fell in love with her himself. She came down the steps and crossed the platform to meet Ben Yakov, stopping just short of running into his arms, and let forth a stream of quick and insistent Italian as she gestured toward the train. Andras wondered how Ben Yakov could keep from embracing her; it gave him a moment’s worry before he remembered it was forbidden by her observance. Ben Yakov would not touch her until he placed the ring on her finger at the wedding. But she raised her eyes to him with a look more intimate than an embrace, and he offered her the pansies, and she gave him that smile again.
Tibor had crossed the platform behind Signorina di Sabato; he set the bandbox at her feet and propped the umbrella against it. She spoke a few words in a tone of gratitude and he made a quiet reply, not meeting her gaze. Then he put an arm around Andras, bent to his ear, and said, “Congratulations, little brother.”
“Congratulate Ben Yakov!” Andras said. “He’s the groom.”
“He is now,” Tibor said. “But you’ll be next. Where’s your bride?” He went to Klara, kissed her on both cheeks and embraced her. “I’ve never had a sister,” he told her. “You’ll have to teach me how to be a proper brother to you.”
“You’ve got a fine start,” Klara said. “Here you are, all the way from Modena.”
“I’m afraid I won’t be very good company tonight,” Tibor said. He put a hand on Andras’s sleeve. “I’ve got a rather bad headache. I don’t think I’m fit for a celebration at the moment.” In fact he seemed overcome with exhaustion; he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with two fingers before he greeted the others. He shook Ben Yakov’s hand, gave Polaner an appreciative clap on the shoulder, told Rosen what a pleasure it was to see him with such a lovely companion. And then he drew Andras aside.
“Get me to bed,” he said. “I’m whipped. I think I may be ill.”
“Of course,” Andras said. “We’ll get your bags and go.” He had planned to accompany Signorina di Sabato to Klara’s house, to see her comfortably settled there, but Klara insisted she could manage on her own. There wasn’t much to transport: Signorina di Sabato had a small trunk and a wooden crate in addition to the bandbox, and those pieces, along with the fancy umbrella, made up the sum of her possessions. They got everything to the curb and Ben Yakov hailed a cab. He held the door for Signorina di Sabato and ushered her inside; to preserve her modesty he allowed Klara to slide in next. Finally, with a salute to the rest of them, he ducked into the cab and pulled the door closed.
Rosen and Shalhevet remained on the sidewalk with Andras and his brother. “Won’t you come have a drink?” Rosen asked.
Tibor made his apologies in his confident but skeletal French, and Shalhevet and Rosen assured him that they understood. Andras called another cab. He had thought they might walk home, but Tibor looked as if he might fall to his knees at any moment. He was quiet on the way to the rue des Écoles; all he would say about the journey was that it had been long and that he was relieved it was over.
They climbed out of the cab and took Tibor’s things inside. By the time they got to the top, Tibor was taking rapid shallow breaths and bracing himself against the wall. Andras hastily unlocked the door. Tibor went in and lay down on the bed, not bothering to remove his shoes or overcoat, and put an arm over his eyes.
“Tibi,” Andras said. “What can I do? Shall I go to the pharmacist’s? Do you want something to drink?”
Tibor kicked his shoes loose and let them drop to the floor. He rolled onto his side and curled his knees to his chest. Andras went to the bed and leaned over him. He touched Tibor’s forehead: dry and hot. Tibor pulled the quilt over himself and began to shiver.
“You’re sick,” Andras said, one hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“Common virus. I felt it coming on all week. I just need to sleep.”
In another instant Tibor had drifted off. He slept as Andras took his coat off, as Andras undressed him and laid a cool cloth over his forehead. Around midnight the fever broke and Tibor threw the covers off, but it wasn’t long before he was shivering again. He woke and told Andras to get a box of aspirin from his suitcase. Andras gave him the medicine and covered Tibor with every blanket and coat he had. Finally Tibor turned over onto his side and slept. Andras unrolled the mattress he’d borrowed from the concierge and lay down on the floor beside the fire, but found himself unable to sleep. He paced the room, checking on Tibor every half hour until his forehead grew cooler and his breathing deepened. Andras lay down in his clothes on the borrowed mattress; he didn’t want to take the covers from his brother.
In the morning it was Tibor who woke first. By the time Andras opened his eyes his brother had made tea and toasted a few pieces of bread. Sometime in the night he must have spread a blanket over Andras. Now he sat in the orange velvet chair, clean and close-shaven, wearing Andras’s robe and eating toast with jam. At intervals he blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief.
“Well,” Andras said, from his mattress on the floor. “You’re alive.”
“You’d better not get near me, though. I’ve still got a fever.”
“Too late. I took care of you all night.” He sat up and ran his hands through his hair to stand it on end.
Tibor smiled. “That style suits you, brother.”
“Thank you, brother. And how are you feeling this morning? Any better?”
“Better than I felt on the train.” He looked down into his teacup. “I’m sure Signorina di Sabato must have thought me a fine companion.”
“She seemed in good enough spirits when you arrived.”
“She had a few bad moments when we left Florence, but on the whole she was rather brave.”
“Made bold by love,” Andras said.
Tibor gave a nod and turned the cup in its saucer. “Tell me,” he said. “What kind of person is this Ben Yakov?”
“You’ve met him,” Andras said, and shrugged. “He’s a good enough man.”
“Is that the best you can say for him?”
It wasn’t, after all. Andras remembered the talk they’d had at Polaner’s bedside after the attack. It was Ben Yakov who had shamed them both into realizing how little they knew of their friend, and how unlikely it was that he would have chosen to confide in either of them. “He’s a good friend,” Andras said. “He’s a good student. Women like him. He hasn’t always been honest with them, but he’s been nothing but sincere about Ilana.”
“She told me how they met,” Tibor said. “It was at the marketplace. She was there with a friend. She had just bought two live chickens, but they broke their cage and got away. They went down an alley and ran into someone’s courtyard. Ben Yakov caught them. He got them back into their cage and fixed it with wire. Then he insisted on carrying them home for her.”
“Escaped chickens,” Andras said. “A romantic beginning.”
“And then he started visiting her in secret,” Tibor said.
“Yes, of course. He’s always had a flair for the dramatic.”
“And there was the problem of her family’s plans for her. But it all seems rather dishonorable on his part, doesn’t it? He might have declared himself to her father and made an argument for himself.”
Andras gave a short laugh. “That’s just what Klara said, almost to the letter.”
Tibor frowned and put his cup on the table. He laced his fingers over his chest, looking out at the gray sky and the ostrich plumes of chimney smoke fading into its heights. “The girl is nineteen,” he said. “I saw her passport. Her birthday was last week. Do you know what else? She has a birthmark on her neck in the shape of a flying bird.”
“What sort of bird?” Andras said. “A chicken?”
Tibor gave a great helpless laugh, which led him into a cough. He leaned forward in the chair, covering his mouth with the handkerchief. When he sat back, he had to wipe his eyes with his sleeve and drink the rest of his tea before he could speak.
“Why do I bother talking to you?” he said.
“I suppose you got into the habit years ago and never quit.”
“Anyway, we’ve got more important things to discuss. Your engagement to Madame Morgenstern, for one.”
“Ah, yes. By some miracle, Klara Morgenstern has agreed to be my wife.”
“So you’ll be the first of the three of us to marry, too.”
“Unless the world ends before next summer.”
“A distinct possibility, the way things stand at the moment,” Tibor said.
“But if not, she’ll be Madame Lévi.”
“And what about this secret history of hers?”
Andras had refused to write him about it, saying instead that they would talk once Tibor came to visit; he had remembered the elder Mrs. Hász’s caution and decided it might be unwise to send the story via post. Now he joined Tibor at the little table and related Klara’s history from beginning to end, a revelation Klara herself had given him permission to make. When he’d finished, Tibor regarded him in stunned silence for a long moment.
“What a horror,” he said finally. “All of it. And now she’s an exile.”
“And there’s our problem,” Andras said. “Apparently insoluble.”
“You haven’t written to Anya and Apa about this, have you? Haven’t told them you’re engaged, or any of it?”
“I haven’t had the heart. I suppose I’m hoping Klara’s situation will change.”
“But how, if there’s no statute of limitations?”
“I don’t know how, I confess. Until it does, I’ll share her exile.”
“Ah, Andráska,” Tibor said. “Little brother.”
“You did warn me,” Andras said.
“And you ignored me, of course.” He bent to cough into his fist. “I shouldn’t be sitting up so long. I should be in bed. And I shouldn’t be giving anyone advice about love, of all things. Here’s what I know of the heart: It’s a four-chambered organ whose purpose is to pump blood. Left ventricle, right ventricle, left atrium, right atrium, and all the valves, tricuspid, mitral, pulmonary, and aortic.” He coughed again. “Ah, get me back to bed and let me sleep. And don’t give me any more bad news when I wake.”
The next day, when he was well enough to venture out, Tibor suggested they pay a visit to Signorina di Sabato-to make sure she was comfortably settled, he said, and to return a book he’d borrowed from her on the train: a beautiful old edition of the Divina Commedia, bound in tooled leather. When Andras expressed surprise that Signorina di Sabato would be reading Dante, Tibor insisted that she was better read than any girl he’d ever met. From the age of twelve she’d been a secret borrower from the library near her home in the Jewish Quarter. The Divina Commedia belonged to that library; Tibor showed Andras the stamp on the spine. She hadn’t meant to steal it, but as she was packing she realized that if she left it behind, her parents would find out that she’d been borrowing from the library in secret. She had told Tibor about it on the train, laughing sadly at herself as she did: There she’d been, running off to Paris to get married, and what had worried her was the idea that her parents might be scandalized by her having borrowed secular library books.
At Klara’s they found Signorina di Sabato engaged in hemming the ivory silk dress that was to be her wedding gown. Klara sat beside her on the sofa, sewing a fine band of scalloped lace along the edge of a veil. Elisabet, not usually one to take an interest in what everyone else was doing, pored over a book of fancy cakes; she gave Tibor a look of mild curiosity and waved to him from her chair. But Ilana di Sabato was on her feet the moment she saw him, the ivory dress falling from her lap to the floor.
“Ah, Tibor!” she said, and followed with a few quick words in Italian. She made a gesture toward the library book and offered a smile of gratitude.
“You brought the book,” Klara said. “She told me you’d borrowed it. I understood that much. We’ve been getting by, between my bit of Italian and her bit of French.”
“And what does Signorina di Sabato think of Paris?” Andras asked.
“She likes it very well indeed,” Klara said. “We had a walk in the Tuileries this morning.”
“I’m sure she despises it,” Elisabet answered, not raising her eyes from the book of cakes. “So cold and dismal. I’m sure she wants to go back to Florence.”
Signorina di Sabato gave Elisabet a questioning look. Tibor translated, and Signorina di Sabato shook her head and made an insistent reply.
“She doesn’t hate it at all,” Tibor said.
“She will, soon enough,” Elisabet said. “It’s depressing in December.”
Klara set down the wedding veil and declared that she would like some tea. “Won’t you help me with the tray?” she asked Andras. He followed her into the kitchen, where a raft of recipe books lay open on the table.
Andras touched a page on which there was a drawing of a whole fish dressed in thin slices of lemon. “And when will the wedding be?” he asked.
“Next Sunday,” Klara said. “Ben Yakov has arranged it with the rabbi. His parents are taking the train from Rouen. We’ll have the luncheon here afterward.”
“Klárika,” Andras said, taking her by the waist and turning her toward him. “No one meant for you to host a wedding luncheon.”
She put his arms around his neck. “They have to have some sort of party.”
“But it’s too much. You’ve got the recital to think about.”
“I want to do it,” she said. “I may have been too quick to judge the situation when we talked before. Your friend seems to have some serious notions of love, after all. And I think I expected Signorina di Sabato to be a different sort of girl.”
“Different in what way?”
“Less confident, perhaps. Less mature. Maybe even less intelligent, which should indicate to you how small-minded I’ve become. I consider myself a Jew, with my occasional observances, but I think of truly observant Jews as old-fashioned and myopic. Evidence of my ignorance, I suppose.”
“And Ben Yakov? Has he been here?”
“He spent most of Shabbos with us,” Klara said. “He’s been terribly kind and respectful, if a bit anxious. This morning he brought the rabbi to meet her, and they made all the plans for the wedding. Afterward, privately, he begged me to tell him if she seemed at all unhappy.”
“And what did you say?”
Klara arranged the teacups and saucers on a blue tray. “I told him she seemed fine, given the circumstances. I know she misses her parents. She showed me their photograph and wept. But I don’t think she regrets what she’s done.” She measured the tea into a strainer and lowered it into the pot. “Of course, Elisabet has been difficult. She’s suffering from jealousy. I’m terrified she’ll run off at any moment to marry her American. But this morning she told me she wanted to make the cake, which is something.” She shook her head and gave him a wry half smile. “And what about your brother? Is he well? I worried when you didn’t come yesterday.”
Andras paused before he spoke, running his hand along the edge of the tea tray. “He’s exhausted from overwork. And he’s been ill, but not dangerously so. He’s been sleeping almost constantly, and when he’s awake he burns through my handkerchiefs like wildfire.” He raised his eyes to Klara. “He’s concerned about our situation. I told him everything yesterday.”
She lowered her eyes. “Is he sorry we’re engaged?”
“Oh, no. He’s sorry about what happened to you. And he’s sorry you can’t go home to your family.” He touched the handle of one of the fragile cups and noticed for the first time that the pattern of her china was almost identical to her mother’s. “Of course, he’s worried about how our parents will take the news. But he doesn’t oppose our engagement. He knows what I feel for you.”
She put her arms around him and sighed. “I didn’t want to bring you this unhappiness.”
“Stop that at once,” he said, and kissed her bruise-colored eyelids.
When they returned to the sitting room they found Elisabet making a list of cake ingredients at her mother’s desk while Tibor sat on the sofa beside Signorina di Sabato, speaking to her in rapid Italian. He leaned toward her, his eyes steady upon hers, his hands trembling on his knees as he spoke. Signorina di Sabato shook her head, then shook it again more emphatically as she bent over her sewing. Finally she fixed her needle in the ivory silk and looked up at Tibor with something like dismay.
“Mi dispiace,” she said. “Mi dispiace molto.”
Tibor sat back and scrubbed his face with both hands. He glanced at the tea tray, at the clock on the mantel, and finally at Andras. “What time are you expected at studio?” he asked.
Andras wasn’t expected at any particular time, and Tibor knew it; this was Sunday, and he was going in simply because he needed to work. But Tibor was looking at him with such fixed concentration that Andras knew he had to respond with some concrete projection of their remaining time at Klara’s.
“Half an hour from now,” he said. “Polaner will be waiting.”
“Half an hour!” Klara said. “You should have told me. There’s no time for tea.”
“Yes, we should be off, I’m afraid,” Tibor said. He thanked Klara for her kindness and voiced the hope that he would see her again soon. As they put on their coats in the hallway, Andras wondered if Signorina di Sabato would let them leave without offering a word of farewell. But just before they went down, she appeared in the hallway with a hand on her chest as though she were trying to mute her heartbeat. She paused before Tibor and spoke a few sentences in such warm insistent Italian that Andras thought she might burst into tears. Tibor made an unintelligible reply and went down the stairs.
“What was that about?” Andras asked once they were out on the street. “What did she say?”
“She thanked me for the book,” Tibor said, and refused to speak another word all the way to the École Spéciale.
Ben Yakov married his Florentine bride on the coldest day of the year. A fine frozen mist was falling outside the Synagogue de la Victoire; Signorina di Sabato, in her white silk gown and icy veil, seemed dressed in a coalescence of winter air. But inside the synagogue it was hot and close, and Andras could feel the warmth emanating from the bride’s body as she entered the wedding canopy. Her features were hidden beneath the layers of the veil, but he could see her hands trembling as she circled Ben Yakov seven times. Andras exchanged a look with Rosen, who held another of the wedding canopy poles, and with Polaner, who held a third; the fourth canopy-bearer was Tibor himself. Ben Yakov was resplendent in his groom’s cloak; like the tallis, the kittel was pure white to serve as a reminder of death. The cloak was meant to be used someday as his shroud. After the rabbi had said a blessing over the wine, Ben Yakov placed a ring on Ilana’s finger and declared that she was consecrated to him according to the laws of Moses and Israel. In accordance with the custom, she remained silent beneath her veil and would not give Ben Yakov a ring of his own until after the ceremony. Ben Yakov’s uncles and grandfathers were called to the wedding canopy to recite the Seven Blessings. Andras could feel tension gathering in the sanctuary as they spoke, could sense it like a rise in barometric pressure; beneath the solemnity of the Hebrew words he felt the congregation’s awareness that this was an elopement, an act of rebellion on the part of the bride. And there was another sensation, too, a darker sense of anticipation: Before them stood a virgin who would not be a virgin for long.
When the uncles and grands-pères had taken their turns, and the wine had been blessed again, Ben Yakov broke the wedding cup beneath his heel. The bride lifted her veil at last as if she’d been startled by the sound, and the small party of guests sang siman tov u’mazal tov. And then everyone went to the rue de Sévigné for the bridal luncheon.
In the dining room there was a filet of roasted salmon, a wedding challah, steaming dishes of red potatoes and sweet golden noodles; there was costly white asparagus from Morocco, a bowl of oranges from Spain, and, on its own side table, the astonishing cake Elisabet had baked: a splendid three-tiered confection decorated with sugar beads and silver candy leaves. In the bedroom just on the other side of the dining-room wall, Madame and Monsieur Ben Yakov were spending their half hour of ritual seclusion. A violinist and a clarinet player entertained some of the guests in the sitting room, and others stood drinking white wine and admiring the luncheon dishes.
In the kitchen, Tibor had concerned himself with the care of a child who had slipped on a patch of ice outside. Andras helped him bandage the girl’s cut knee and clean the abrasions on her palms. She was a small cousin of Ben Yakov’s, dark-eyed and somber in a blue velvet dress; she seemed to relish the close attention of two such finely dressed young men, and when they had finished applying the bandages she instructed them to stay with her until she was better. She began a game with Tibor in which she would point to an object in the kitchen and call out the French word, to which Tibor would respond with the corresponding word in Hungarian; she seemed to find every Hungarian word hilarious. Andras was grateful for the distraction. He had begun to suspect that something momentous and unspeakable had passed between Tibor and Signorina di Sabato on the train from Florence. Andras and Tibor had spent the past week in what should have been enjoyable pursuits-they’d gone to the cinema and to a jazz show in Montmartre; they’d had a night of drinking with Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov to mark the end of the groom’s bachelorhood; they had accompanied Ben Yakov to the tailor to pick up his wedding suit, and had helped to lay in supplies at the couple’s apartment-but Tibor had been distant and abstracted through all of it, often receding into silence when Ilana’s name arose in conversation. Today he had been in a black mood, cursing his shoelace when it broke, railing at the chill of the water in the basin, nearly shouting at Andras when Andras had hurried him along toward Klara’s after the ceremony. But his attendence upon the little girl had calmed him; he seemed more like himself now, playing the game she’d invented.
“Passoire,” said the girl, pointing to a colander.
“Szűrő edény,” Tibor said in Hungarian.
“Ha! And what about spatule?”
“Spachtli.”
“Spachtli! And what about couteau?” The little girl grabbed a fierce-looking carving knife from the table and held it out for Tibor’s pronouncement.
“Kés,” he said. “But you’d better give that to me.” He took it from her and turned to put it away; just at that moment the new Madame Ben Yakov appeared in the doorway, her cheeks wildly flushed, a haze of black curls escaping from her coiled braids. The knife hovered in Tibor’s hand just centimeters from the ivory buttons of her dress. If she had come rushing into the room, he would have run her through.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, and took a small step back.
Their eyes met, and they both laughed.
“Don’t kill the bride, brother,” Andras said.
Tibor set the knife on the counter, slowly, as if it couldn’t be trusted.
The little girl, feeling the strangeness of the moment, looked up at all of them with frank curiosity. When no one spoke, she took it upon herself to begin a conversation.
“I hurt my knee,” she explained to the bride, showing her the bandage. “This man fixed it.”
Madame Ben Yakov nodded her understanding and bent to inspect the bandage. The little girl turned her knee this way and that. When the inspection was complete she got down from her chair and arranged her velvet skirts. She made a show of limping delicately out of the room.
Madame Ben Yakov gave Tibor a fleeting smile. “Ché buon medico siete,” she said. She edged past him and turned on the faucet at the porcelain sink, where she performed the ritual of hand-washing. Tibor watched every movement: the filling of the cup, the removal of her new wedding ring, the passing of water three times over the right hand, three times over the left.
…
After the luncheon there was dancing downstairs in the studio. In observance of Orthodox tradition, the men danced on one side of the room and the women on the other, shielded from each other’s view by a folding screen. Every now and then the men glimpsed the flying hem of a dress or the flash of a hair ribbon; every now and then a woman’s satin shoe came sliding out toward the wall, where the men could witness its suggestion of a woman’s bare foot. The women laughed behind their screen, their feet beating quick rhythmic couplets on the studio floor. But the men were awkward with each other on their side of the screen. No one wanted to dance. It wasn’t until Rosen produced a flask of whiskey from his pocket, and passed its fire around the circle twice, that they began to shuffle in time with the music. Ben Yakov and Rosen linked arms and jostled each other to the right and left. They took each other’s hands and began to spin until they both stumbled. Rosen grabbed Andras’s shoulder, Andras grabbed Polaner’s, Polaner grabbed Ben Yakov’s, Ben Yakov grabbed his father’s, and soon all the men were following each other in a clumsy circle. Ben Yakov and his father broke off into the center of the ring, taking each other by the shoulders; they kicked their heels skyward until their shirttails flew free and their pomaded hair swung loose in waves. Only Tibor stood with his back against the practice barre, watching.
Finally the moment arrived when Madame and Monsieur Ben Yakov would be lifted in chairs and carried around the room. The women emerged from behind their screen to watch; the sight of Klara with her hair fallen from its knot, her dress faintly damp against her breastbone, made Andras lose his breath. For a moment it seemed unfair that this was anyone else’s wedding but their own. Then she caught his eye and smiled, seeming to understand what he was thinking, and there was so much certainty and promise in her look that he couldn’t begrudge Ben Yakov his happiness.
After the wedding, only three days remained of Tibor’s visit. His mood seemed to lighten somewhat; he followed Andras to school and work and earned everyone’s admiration wherever he went. Monsieur Forestier gave him tickets to the shows whose sets he had designed, including Madame Gérard’s Antigone, which Tibor found admirable in every regard with the exception of the lead actress’s performance. Georges Lemain, at the architecture firm, was enthralled by Tibor’s ability to identify any opera by nothing more than a few hummed bars; he treated them to a matinee of La Traviata, and afterward they toured a maison particulier under construction in the Seventeenth, a house Lemain had designed for a Nobel laureate chemist and his family. He showed Tibor the northern-lit laboratory, the library with its ebony bookshelves, the high-ceilinged bedrooms that overlooked a landscaped courtyard. Tibor praised everything in his earnest French, and Lemain promised to design a similar house for him when he was a famous doctor. All through those three days, as Tibor and Andras went from one place to another, one commitment to another, Andras looked for a chance to ask Tibor about Signorina di Sabato, but never found the right moment to introduce the subject. At night, when they might have stayed up late to drink and talk, Tibor claimed exhaustion. Andras lay awake on the mattress on the floor, wondering how to break the fragile cell wall that seemed to separate him from his brother; he had a sense of Tibor hiding behind that translucent membrane as if he were afraid to be seen in sharp focus.
Tibor’s train departed on the night of Klara’s students’ Spectacle d’Hiver. Andras was to take him to the station and then meet Klara afterward at the Théâtre Deux Anges. The prospect of parting made them both quiet on the Métro; as they rode beneath the city, Andras found himself considering the long list of things they hadn’t talked about during the days that had just passed. Now, once again, they would part without knowing when they would see each other next. They hauled Tibor’s things out of the Métro and took them into the station. Once they’d checked the suitcases, they sat down together on a high-backed bench and shared a thermos of coffee. Across the platform stood the locomotive that would pull Tibor’s train to Italy: a giant insect of glossy black steel, its wheel pistons bent like the legs of a grasshopper.
“Listen, brother,” Tibor said, his dark eyes fixed upon the train. “I hope you’ll forgive my behavior at the wedding. It was abominable. I acted dishonorably.”
So here it was, half an hour before his train departed. “What was abominable?”
“You know what I mean. Don’t make me say it.”
“I didn’t see you do anything dishonorable.”
“I couldn’t be happy for them,” he said. “I couldn’t eat that gorgeous cake. I couldn’t bring myself to dance.” He took another breath. “I did an abominable thing, Andras. Not at the wedding. Before.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I did something unforgivable on the train.” He crossed his arms over his chest and lowered his eyes. “I’m ashamed to tell you. It was ungentlemanly. Worse. It was a scoundrel’s move.”
And then he admitted that he’d fallen in love with Ilana di Sabato from the beginning, from the moment he saw her coming across the platform in Florence with her umbrella and her pale green bandbox. There was a little boy with her-her brother, who had come along to help with the suitcases. He had a look of importance about him, Tibor said-importance and great secrecy. But Tibor saw the realization dawning upon him that this wasn’t a game, that his sister was really going to climb aboard a train and go to Paris. The little boy’s face had crumpled. He’d put the suitcase down and sat on it and cried. And Ilana di Sabato sat down with him and explained that it would be all right, that she’d get him to come visit her, that she’d bring her fine new husband home to meet him and the rest of the family. But he mustn’t tell anyone, not for a while yet. You had to see it, Tibor said, how she’d made him understand that.
“I told myself it was natural to feel a certain tenderness for her,” he went on. “She’d been entrusted to my care, and she was entirely without defenses, and she was out in the world for the first time. Everything was new to her. Or not entirely new, because she’d read about it all in books-it was all coming true for her, a world she’d imagined but had never seen. I watched it happen. I was the one she turned to when we crossed the Italian border. It was like watching a person being born. The pain of it, too. I saw her understand she’d left her parents, her family, behind. When she cried after the crossing, I put my arms around her. I did it almost without thinking.” He paused and took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “And she looked up at me, Andras, and by now you’ve guessed it. I kissed her. Not an innocent kiss, I’m afraid. Not a brief one. So you see, I did transgress against your friend. And I transgressed against Ilana. And not just then.” He paused again. “I want to tell you this, because it’s been weighing on me since it happened. I said something to her, here in this station, just before we got off the train.”
“What did you say?”
“I reminded her she still had a choice,” Tibor said. “I told her I’d be happy to take her back to Italy if she changed her mind.” He shook his head and put on his glasses again. “And I confessed myself to her, Andras. Later. I did it the morning we went to see her at Klara’s. When we went to give her that library book.”
Andras remembered the whispered conversation, Tibor’s trembling hands, Ilana’s dismay. “Oh, Tibor,” he said. “So that’s what was happening when I came in from the kitchen.”
“That’s right,” Tibor said. “And for a moment I thought I saw her hesitate. I deluded myself that she might feel something for me, too.” He shook his head. “If I’d gone to see her again, I might have ruined your friend’s happiness.”
“But you didn’t,” Andras said. “Everything went as planned. And they both seemed perfectly happy at the wedding.” He believed it as he said it, but a moment later he found himself wondering whether it had been true. Hadn’t Ilana seemed distressed that morning with Tibor? Hadn’t there been some strange exchange of energy between them in the kitchen on her wedding day? Was she sitting in Ben Yakov’s apartment and thinking of Tibor at that very moment?
“They’re married,” Tibor said. “It’s done. Now my feelings for her are their own punishment.”
Andras understood. He put an arm around his brother’s shoulders and looked at the insect form of the locomotive.
“I’ve been terribly lonely in Modena,” Tibor said. “It must have been the same for you, coming here. But you met Klara.”
“Yes,” he said. “And that was terrible, too, at times.”
“I see how it is between you now,” Tibor said. “So many times this week I was sick with envy.” He pressed his hands between his knees. At the window of the locomotive an argument was taking place between the engineer and an official-looking conductor, as though they were debating whether to make the trip to Italy after all.
“Don’t go back,” Andras said. “Come live with me, if you want.”
Tibor shook his head. “I have to go to school. I want to finish my studies. And in any case, I don’t know if I could stand to be so close to her.”
Andras turned to his brother. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s true.”
There was an almost imperceptible shift in Tibor’s features, a softening of the lines around his mouth. “She is,” he said. “I can see her in that gown and veil. God, Andras, do you think she’ll be happy?”
“I hope so.”
Tibor nudged the corner of his leather satchel with the toe of his polished shoe. “I think you’d better write to Anya and Apa,” he said. “Let them know what’s happened between you and Klara. Tell them as much as you can about her situation. I’ll write them too. I’ll tell them I’ve gotten to know her, and that I don’t consider you mad for wanting to marry her.”
“I am mad, though.”
“No more so than any man in love,” Tibor said.
The conductor blew the boarding whistle. Tibor got to his feet and drew Andras close in a quick embrace. “Be a good man, little brother,” he said.
“Bon voyage,” Andras said. “Have a good spring. Study hard. Cure the sick.”
Tibor crossed the platform and boarded the train, his bag slung over his shoulder. Moments after he’d climbed aboard, the train gave a vast metallic groan; with a series of grunts and screeches it began to roll from the station. The grasshopper legs of the engine bent and flexed. Andras hoped Tibor had found a window seat, where he would have the comfort of watching the city fade into the darkness of the wintry fields. He hoped Tibor would be able to sleep. He hoped he’d get home swiftly, and that once he was there he would forget there had ever been a girl called Ilana di Sabato.
That year’s Spectacle d’Hiver was a quiet and humble affair. The Théâtre Deux Anges was small and shabby and ill-heated, its blue velvet seats faded to gray; the dark upper tiers seemed full of ghosts. Girls chased each other across the stage in costumes of blue and white satin, and a silver snow drifted down from some cold cloud in the flyspace. A group of twelve-year-olds in icy pink tulle put Andras in mind of dawn on New Year’s Day. He thought of Klara at the Square Barye: the flush of her forehead beneath her red wool hat, the crystalline dew on her eyebrows, the fog of her breath in the cold air. He could scarcely believe she would be waiting for him backstage after the recital-the same woman who had kissed him in that frozen park nearly a year ago. It seemed a miracle that any man who loved a woman might be loved by her in return. He rubbed his hands together in the chill and waited for the violet lights to fade.
EVERY SPRING the students of the École Spéciale competed for the Prix du Amphithéâtre, which brought its winner a gold medal worth a hundred francs, the admiration of the other students, and a measure of prestige for the winner’s curriculum vitae. Last year’s prize had gone to the beautiful Lucia for her design of a reinforced-concrete apartment building. This year’s subject was an urban gymnasium for Olympic sports: swimming, diving, gymnastics, weightlifting, running, fencing. It seemed to Andras a ridiculous notion to design a gymnasium while Europe edged toward war. Refugees poured into France from fractured Spain; the Marais had become a swamp of asylum-seekers. Hundreds of thousands more had been detained at the border and sent to internment camps in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Every day brought bad news, and the worst always seemed to come from Czechoslovakia. Hitler had told the Czech foreign minister that the nation must take a more aggressive approach to its Jewish problem; a week later the Czech government threw Jewish men and women out of their university professorships and civil-service jobs and public-health positions. In Hungary, Horthy followed suit by calling for a new cabinet that would support a stronger alliance with the Axis powers. It wouldn’t be long, newspaper columnists speculated, before the Hungarian parliament passed new anti-Jewish laws, too.
In the face of such news, how was Andras supposed to design a swimming pool, a locker room, a yard for fencing practice? Late one night he sat in the studio with an open letter on the table before him, his drawing tools still in their box. The letter had come earlier that day from his brother Mátyás:
12 February 1939
Budapest
Andráska,
Anya and Apa have just told me your great news. Mazel tov! I must meet the lucky girl as soon as possible. Since it seems you’ll be in France for the foreseeable future, I will have to join you there. I’m saving money already. By now you’ve heard from our parents that I have left school. I am living in Budapest and working as a window trimmer. It’s a good trade. I make 20 pengő a week. My best client is the haberdasher on Molnár utca. I heard from a friend that their old window trimmer had quit, so I went there the next day and offered my services. They told me to trim the window as a trial. I made a hunting display: two riding suits, one cloak, four neckties, a hunting blanket, a hat, a horn. I finished in an hour, and in another hour they had sold everything in the window. Even the horn.
Budapest is grand. I have many new friends here and perhaps one girlfriend. Also a fabulous dance teacher, an American Negro who calls himself Kid Sneeks. A month ago I saw him at the Gold Hat with his tap-dance team, the Five Hot Shots. After the show I stayed to meet the star. With the help of my girlfriend, who speaks a few words of English, I told him I was a dancer and asked him to take me on as a pupil. He said, Let’s see what you can do. I showed him everything. On the spot he gave me the English nickname of Lightning and agreed to teach me as long as he’s in Budapest. And his show is so popular it’s been held over another month.
I know you will scold me for quitting gimnázium, but believe me I am happier now. I hated school. The masters punished me for my bad attitude. The other boys were idiots. And Debrecen! What a place. Not the country nor the city, not modern nor quaint, not home nor a place I would want to make my home. In Budapest there is a better Jewish gimnázium. If I can, I will transfer my records and finish my studies there. Then I will come to you in Paris and go onto the stage. If you’re kind to me I will teach you to tap-dance.
Do not worry about me, brother. I am fine. I’m glad you are also fine. Don’t marry before I get there. I want to kiss the bride on your wedding day.
Love,
Your M ÁTYÁS
He read and reread the letter. I will finish my studies. Come to you in Paris. Go onto the stage. How did Mátyás expect any of those things to happen if Europe went to war? Did he read the newspapers? Did he expect that the world’s problems might be solved through tap-dancing? What was Andras supposed to write in return?
He heard footsteps approaching in the hall; it was the middle of the night, and he hadn’t arranged to meet anyone. Without thinking, he opened his pencil box and reached for his sharpening knife. But then the footsteps resolved into a familiar tread, and there was Professor Vago in his evening clothes, leaning against the doorjamb.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” Vago said. “If you wanted to read your mail, couldn’t you have done it at home?”
Andras shrugged and smiled. “It’s warmer here,” he said. Then, raising an eyebrow at Vago’s suit: “Nice tuxedo.”
Vago tugged at his lapels. “This is the last suit of clothing I own without an ink or charcoal stain.”
“So you’ve come here to spill ink on yourself.”
“Something like that.”
“Where were you, the opera?”
He plucked the rose out of his buttonhole and gave it a slow reflective twirl. “I was out dancing with Madame Vago, if you want to know. She likes that sort of thing. But she gets tired around halfway to dawn, whereas I find I can’t sleep after dancing.” He came toward the worktable and bent over Andras’s drawings. “Are these for the contest?”
“Yes. Polaner started them. I’m supposed to finish.”
“You were wise to partner with him. He’s one of our best.”
“He was unwise,” Andras said. “He chose me.”
“May I?” Vago said. He took Andras’s notebook and looked through the sketches, pausing over the drawings of the pool with its retractable roof. He flipped the page to the drawing of the natatorium with the roof open, and then back to the drawing of the same room with its roof closed.
“It’s all done with hydraulics,” Andras said, pointing out the closet that would house the machinery. “And the panels are curved and overlapped at the meeting point here, so the weather won’t come through.” He paused and bit the end of his drafting pencil, anxious to know what Vago thought. It was a design inspired as much by Forestier’s chameleonic stage sets as by Lemain’s sleek public buildings.
“It’s fine work,” Vago said. “You do your mentors credit. But why are you mooning around here in the middle of the night? If you’re going to come to school at three in the morning, at the very least you ought to be working.”
“I can’t concentrate,” Andras said. “Everything’s falling apart. Look at this.” He took a newspaper from his schoolbag and pushed it across the desk toward Vago. On the front page, a photograph showed Jewish students crowded at the gates of a university in Prague; they had been summarily disenrolled and were not allowed to enter. Vago picked up the paper and studied the photograph, then dropped it onto the worktable.
“You’re still in school,” he said. “Are you going to do your work?”
“I want to,” Andras said.
“Then do.”
“But I feel like I have to do something more than draw buildings. I want to go to Prague and march in the streets.”
Vago pulled up a stool and sat down. He took off his long silk scarf and folded it over his knees. “Listen,” he said. “Those bastards in Berlin can go to hell. They can’t kick anyone out of school here in Paris. You’re an artist and you have to practice.”
“But a gymnasium,” Andras said. “At a time like this.”
“At a time like this, everything’s political,” Vago said. “Our Magyar countrymen didn’t let Jewish athletes swim for them in ’36, though their time trials were better than the medalists’. But here you are, a Jewish architecture student, designing an athletic club to be built in a country where Jews can still qualify for the Olympics.”
“For now, anyway.”
“Why ‘for now’?”
“It hasn’t escaped my notice that Daladier brought von Ribbentrop here to sign a friendship pact. And do you know that only the quote-unquote Aryan cabinet ministers were invited to Bonnet’s banquet afterward? Can you guess who wasn’t invited? Jean Zay. Georges Mandel. Jews, both.”
“I heard about that dinner, and who was and wasn’t there. It’s not as simple as you make it out to be. More than a few who were asked declined in protest.”
“But Zay and Mandel weren’t asked. That’s my point.” He opened his box and took out a pencil and the sharpening knife. “With due respect,” he said, “it’s easy for you to talk about this in the abstract. Those aren’t your people at the school gate.”
“They’re people,” Vago said. “That’s enough. It’s a stain upon humanity, this Jew-hating dressed up as nationalism. It’s a sickness. I’ve thought about it every day since those little fascists attacked Polaner.”
“And this is what you’ve concluded?” Andras said. “That we should put our heads down and keep working?”
“Polaner did,” Vago said. “So should you.”
…
18 March 1939
Konyár
My dear Andras,
You can imagine how your mother and I feel about the fate of Czechoslovakia. The rape of the Sudetenland was injury enough. But to see Hitler strip away Slovakia, and then march into Prague unchecked! Those streets where I spent my student days, now filled with Nazi soldiers! Perhaps I was naïve to expect otherwise. Once Slovakia was gone, the country Britain and France agreed to protect had ceased to exist. But one feels as though this string of outrages cannot go on indefinitely. It has to stop, or must be stopped.
There has been much right-wing rejoicing here, of course, about the return of Ruthenia to Hungary. What was stolen from us is ours again, and so on. You know I am a veteran of the Great War and have some sense of national pride. But we know by now what is beneath the flag-wavers’ desire for vindication.
All this bad news notwithstanding, your mother and I agree with Professor Vago. You must not allow recent events to distract you from your studies. You must stay in school. If you’re to be married you must have a trade. You’ve done well so far and will make a fine architect. And perhaps France will be a safer place for you than Hungary. In any case, I will be angry indeed if you throw away what’s been given to you. A chance like that comes only once.
How stern I sound. You know I send my love. I’ve enclosed a letter from your mother.
APA
Dear Andráska,
Listen to your apa! And keep warm. You’ve always been prone to fevers in March. And send me the photograph of your Klara. You made a promise. I will hold you to it.
Love,
ANYA
Each letter with its payload of news and love, each with its reminder of his parents’ mortality. The fact that they had survived two more winters in Konyár without illness or injury hardly helped to assuage his worry; every winter would carry greater danger. He thought about them constantly as the bad news poured in, a deluge of it all spring. In late March the bloody horror of the Spanish Civil War drew to a close; the Republican army surrendered on the morning of the twenty-ninth, and Franco’s troops entered the capital. It was the beginning of the dictatorship foreseen by Hitler and Mussolini, he knew-the very reason they had poured their armaments and troops into the blast furnace of that war. He wondered if those two victories-the splintering of Czechoslovakia and the triumph of Franco in Spain-were what gave Hitler the courage to defy the American president in April. All the papers carried the story: On the fifteenth, Roosevelt had sent Hitler a telegram demanding assurance that Germany would not attack or invade any of a list of thirty-one independent states for at least ten years-including Poland, across which Hitler had proposed a highway and rail corridor to link Germany with East Prussia. After two weeks’ stalling, Hitler responded. In a speech at the Reichstag he denounced Germany’s naval accord with England, tore up the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, and ridiculed Roosevelt’s telegram in every detail. He finished by accusing Roosevelt of meddling in international affairs while he, Hitler, concerned himself only with the fate of his own small nation, which he had already rescued from the ignominy and ruin of 1919.
Debate raged in the halls of the École Spéciale. Rosen wasn’t the only one who believed that Europe was certain to go to war. Ben Yakov wasn’t the only one who argued that war might still be averted. Everyone had an opinion. Andras held with Rosen-he couldn’t see any other way out of the web into which Europe had fallen. As he and Polaner bent over their plans, he found himself thinking of his father’s stories of the Great War-the stench and the bloodshed of combat, the nightmare of planes that rained bullets and fire upon the foot soldiers, the confusion and hunger and filth of the trenches, the surprise of escaping with one’s own life. If there were a war, he would fight. Not for his own country; Hungary would fight alongside Germany, its ally, who had given it not only Ruthenia but also the Upper Province, which it had lost at Trianon. No: If there were a war, Andras would join the Foreign Legion and fight for France. He imagined appearing before Klara in the full glory of a dress uniform, a sword at his waist, the buttons of his coat polished to a painful sheen. She would beg him not to go to war, and he would insist that he must go-that he must protect the ideals of France, the city of Paris, and Klara herself within it.
But in May, two unexpected events served to blot out his awareness of the approaching conflict. The first was a tragedy: Ben Yakov’s bride lost the baby she’d been carrying for five months. It was Klara who went to tend her at Ben Yakov’s apartment, Klara who sent for the doctor when she found Ilana bleeding and wild with fever. At the hospital, in a long linoleum-tiled corridor decorated with lithographs of French doctors, Klara and Andras waited with Ben Yakov while a surgeon emptied Ilana’s womb. Ben Yakov sat in stunned silence, still wearing his pajama shirt. Andras knew he believed this to be his fault. He hadn’t wanted the child. He’d confessed it just a week earlier, late at night in the studio, as they sat working on a problem set for their statics class. “I’m not equal to it,” he’d said, laying his six-sided pencil on the lip of the desk. “I can’t be a father. I can’t support a child. There’s no money. And the world’s falling apart. What if I have to go off and fight a war?”
Andras had thought then of Klara’s womb, that sacred inward space they’d taken pains to keep empty. He’d had to force himself to make an empathetic reply. What he’d wanted to ask was why Ben Yakov had married Ilana di Sabato if he hadn’t wanted a child. Now the subject seemed to hover in the antiseptic air of the corridor: Ben Yakov had wished the child gone, and it was gone.
Outside the hospital windows, the eastern margin of the sky had turned blue with the coming morning. Klara was exhausted, Andras knew: Her spine, usually held so straight, had begun to droop with fatigue. He told her to go home, promised he’d come to see her after they talked to the doctor. He insisted: She had a class to teach that morning at nine. She protested, saying she was willing to stay as long as it took, but in the end he persuaded her to go home and sleep. She said goodbye to Ben Yakov, and he thanked her for having known what to do. They both watched her walk off down the hall, her shoes ticking out their quiet rhythm against the linoleum.
“She knows,” Ben Yakov said, once Klara had disappeared around the corner.
“Knows what?”
“She knows how I felt about the baby.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She would hardly look at me.”
“You’re imagining things,” Andras said. “I know she thinks well of you.”
“Well, she shouldn’t.” He pressed his fingers against his temples.
“It’s not your fault,” Andras said. “No one thinks it is.”
“What if I think it is?”
“It’s still not.”
“What if she thinks it is? Ilana, I mean?”
“It’s still not. And anyway, she won’t think so.”
After the doctor had finished, a pair of orderlies wheeled Ilana out on a gurney and brought her to a ward, where they transferred her to a hospital bed. Andras and Ben Yakov stood beside the bed and watched her sleep. Her skin was wax-white from the loss of blood, her dark hair pushed back from her forehead.
“I think I’m going to faint,” Ben Yakov said.
“You’d better sit down,” Andras said. “Do you want some water?”
“I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been sitting for hours.”
“Take a walk, then. Get some air.”
“I’m hardly dressed for it.”
“Go ahead. It’ll do you good.”
“All right. You’ll stay here with her?”
He promised he wouldn’t move.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Ben Yakov said. He tucked his pajama shirt into his trousers, then went off down the long avenue of beds. Just as he disappeared through the door of the ward, Ilana gave a rising cry of pain and shifted her hips beneath the sheet.
Andras glanced around for a nurse. Three beds away, a silver-haired woman in a crisp cap ministered to another deathly pale girl. “S’il vous plaît,” Andras called.
The nurse came to examine Ilana. She took her pulse and glanced at the chart at the end of the bed. “One moment,” she said, and ran down the ward; she returned a minute later with a syringe and a vial. Ilana opened her eyes and looked around in a daze of pain. She seemed to be searching for something. When her gaze fell upon Andras, her focus sharpened and her forehead relaxed. A faint flush came to her lips.
“It’s you,” she said in Italian. “You came all the way from Modena.”
“It’s Andras,” he told her. “You’re going to be all right.”
The nurse uncovered Ilana’s shoulder and swabbed it with alcohol. “I’m giving her morphine for the pain,” she said. “She’ll feel better in a moment.”
Ilana drew a sharp breath as the needle went in. “Tibor,” she said, turning her eyes again toward Andras. Then the morphine found its mark, and her eyelids fluttered and closed.
“Go home, now,” the nurse said. “We’ll take care of your wife. She needs to rest. You can visit her this afternoon.”
“She’s not my wife,” Andras said. “She’s a friend. I told her husband I’d stay with her until he got back.”
The nurse raised an eyebrow, as if something weren’t quite right about Andras’s story, and went back to her patient down the ward.
Through the windows the sky continued its slow bleed toward blue. The quiet of the ward seemed to deepen as he looked at Ilana, her chest rising and falling beneath the sheet. The drug had enclosed her within a transparent capsule of sleep, like the princess in the fairy tale, Hófehérke-in French it must be Blanche-Neige-the exiled princess sleeping in her glass coffin on a hill, while those little men, the törpék, watched over her. He thought again of the Marot poem he’d cut from Klara’s book. If fire dwells secretly in snow, how can I escape burning? He was glad Ben Yakov hadn’t been there when Ilana had spoken, glad he hadn’t seen her lips flush with color when she’d thought it was Tibor watching over the bed.
Ben Yakov returned forty minutes later, redolent of new-mown grass; the back of his pajama shirt was damp with dew. He took off his cap and smoothed his hair.
“How is she?”
“Fine,” Andras said. “The nurse gave her a shot of morphine.”
“Go on home, now,” Ben Yakov said. “I’ll stay with her until she wakes up.”
“We’re both supposed to leave. The nurse says she has to rest. We can come back this afternoon.”
Ben Yakov didn’t protest. He touched Ilana’s pale forehead and let Andras lead him from the ward. All the way back to the Latin Quarter they walked in silence, their hands stuffed into their pockets. It seemed a particularly cruel morning to have lost a child, Andras thought: A loamy damp scent arose from the window boxes, from the new flowerbeds in the park; the branches of the chestnuts were crowded with small wet leaves. He walked Ben Yakov to the door of his apartment building and they faced each other on the sidewalk.
“You’re a good friend,” Ben Yakov said.
Andras shrugged and looked at the pavement. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Of course you did. You and Klara, both.”
“You would have done the same for us.”
“I’m not much good as a friend,” Ben Yakov said. “Still worse as a husband.”
“Don’t say that.”
“People like me shouldn’t be allowed to marry.” Even after a night at the hospital and an hour’s sleep on a bench, he was elegant in his angular, cinematic way. But he twisted his mouth into a grimace of self-disgust. “I’m neglectful,” he said. “And, to be honest, unfaithful.”
Andras kicked at the boot scraper beside the entryway. He didn’t want to hear anything more about it. He wanted to turn and walk home to the rue des Écoles, climb into bed and sleep. But he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t heard what Ben Yakov had just said.
“Unfaithful,” he said. “When?”
“Always. Whenever she’ll see me. It’s Lucia, of course. From school.” Ben Yakov’s voice had fallen to a half whisper. “I’ve never been able to break it off. Even this morning she came out and sat in the park with me while you watched over my wife. I’m in love, I think, or something horrible like that. I have been ever since I met her.”
Andras felt a surge of indignation on behalf of the girl in the hospital bed. “If you were in love with her, why did you bring Ilana here?”
“I thought she might cure me,” Ben Yakov said. “When I met her in Florence, she made me forget Lucia. She delighted me. And, though it’s shameful to say, her innocence was arousing. She made me think I could be a different person, and for a time I was.” He lowered his eyes. “I was excited about the prospect of marrying her. I knew I couldn’t have married Lucia. She doesn’t want to marry, for one thing. She wants to be an architect and travel the world. For another thing, she’s-une negresse. My parents, you know. I couldn’t.”
Andras thought of the classmate who’d been attacked in the graveyard, the man from Côte d’Ivoire. That style of bigotry was supposed to belong to the other side. But it didn’t, of course. Hadn’t he himself been terrified to speak to Lucia because of her race, and, at the same time, inexplicably excited by her? What if he had fallen in love with her? Could he have married her? Could he have brought her to his parents? He took Ben Yakov’s shoulder in his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Truly.”
“It’s my own fault,” Ben Yakov said. “I should never have married Ilana.”
“You ought to get some sleep now,” Andras said. “You’ll need to go back to see her this afternoon.”
A flint spark of fear burned for an instant in Ben Yakov’s eyes. Andras recognized the expression; he’d seen it countless times on his younger brother’s face at bedtime, just before Andras snuffed the candle. It was the panic of a child afraid to be left alone in the dark. Countless times, Andras had lain down beside Mátyás and listened to him breathing until he fell asleep. But they were adults, he and Ben Yakov; the comfort they could ask of each other was finite. Ben Yakov repeated his thanks and turned away to unlock the door.
The second thing that happened that month-the second thing important enough to turn Andras’s attention away from the increasingly grim headlines-was that the architecture contest came to a close. After a week of sleepless nights during which he experienced nausea, hallucinations, and the vertiginous thrill of last-minute inspiration, he and Polaner found themselves in the crowded amphitheater, waiting to defend their project before the judging panel. Professor Vago had invited Monsieur Lemain to lead the trio of judges. The other two, whose identities had been kept secret until the day of the prize critique, turned out to be none other than Le Corbusier and Georges-Henri Pingusson. Le Corbusier was dressed as if he had come directly from a construction site; his plaster-whitened trousers and sweat-stained workshirt seemed a silent reproach to Lemain in his impeccable black suit, and to Pingusson in his pearl-gray pinstriped jacket. Perret, presiding over the contest, had waxed his moustache to crisp points and put on his most dramatic military cape. The judges walked a slow circuit of the room, examining the models on their display tables and the plans posted on corkboards around the periphery of the amphitheater, and the students followed in a respectful cluster.
Before long, it became clear that a profound difference of opinion existed between Le Corbusier and Pingusson. Everything one said, the other denounced as pure foolishness. At one point Le Corbusier went so far as to poke Pingusson in the chest with his pencil; Pingusson responded by shouting directly into Le Corbusier’s reddened face. The issue at hand was a pair of Dianalike caryatids, the entryway ornamentation of a sports club for women designed by a pair of fourth-year women. Le Corbusier declared the caryatids neoclassicist kitsch. Pingusson said he found them perfectly elegant.
“Elegant!” Le Corbusier spat. “Perhaps you would have said the same of Speer’s monstrosity at the International Exposition! Plenty of hack neoclassicism in evidence there.”
“I beg your pardon,” Pingsson said. “Are you suggesting we forget the Greeks and Romans entirely, simply because the Nazis have appropriated them? Bastardized them, I might say?”
“Everything must be taken in context,” Le Corbusier said. “At the present political moment, this choice seems indefensible. Though perhaps we’re to give the young women a pass because, after all, they’re just women.” Those were the words he punctuated with a pair of jabs to Pingusson’s chest.
“Rubbish!” Pingusson shouted. “How dare you accuse me of chauvinism? When you dismiss this choice as kitsch, are you not entirely disregarding the tradition of feminine power in classical mythology?”
“A fine point,” Lemain said. “And since you’re both so enlightened, gentlemen, why not let the women defend the choice themselves?”
The taller of the student architects-Marie-Laure was her name-began to explain in a neat, clipped French that these were no ordinary caryatids; they were modeled after Suzanne Lenglen, the recently deceased French tennis champion. She went on to defend other features of the design, but Andras lost the thread of the argument. He and Polaner would be critiqued next, and he was too nervous to concentrate on anything but that. Polaner stood beside him, crushing his handkerchief into a dense ball; on his other side was Rosen, who wore a look of vaguely interested detachment. He didn’t have to worry; he hadn’t entered the contest. He’d been too busy with meetings of the Ligue Contre l’Antisemitisme, of which he had recently been elected secretary.
Far too soon for Andras’s comfort, the critique of the women’s sports club concluded and the judges moved on. The students collected behind them around the table where Andras and Polaner’s model was displayed.
“Introduce your project, gentlemen,” Perret said, with a wave of his hand.
Polaner was the first to speak. He tugged at the hem of his jacket, and, in his Polish-tinged French, began to explain the need for an inclusive sports club, one that would stand as a symbol of the founding principles of the Republic. The design would be oriented toward the future; the building’s predominant materials would be reinforced concrete, glass, and steel, with panels of dark wood crowning the doors and windows.
He paused and looked at Andras, who was to speak next. Andras opened his mouth and found that his French had fled entirely. In its place there was an astounding blankness, a book washed clean of text.
“What’s the matter, young man?” Le Corbusier said. “Can’t you speak?”
Andras, who hadn’t slept in three days, was afflicted with a temporal hallucination. Time slowed to a chelonian crawl. He watched the cycle of Le Corbusier’s blink, taking place over what seemed an eternity, behind the plaster-flecked lenses of his glasses. From the back of the amphitheater someone launched an oceanic cough.
He might never have found his voice had not Pierre Vago, Master of Ceremonies, come swiftly to his rescue. Vago was the one who had taught Andras the language he was supposed to speak now; he knew the words that might put Andras at ease. “Why don’t you begin with the piste,” he said. Piste: the running track, French for pálya. They’d had the conversation two days ago in studio: how one said sports track in French, and how that word differed from the ones that meant road, trail, rail, and trace. Andras could talk about the piste; it was the most unusual element of their design, a stroke of recent late-night inspiration. “La piste,” he began, “est construit d’acier galvanisée,” and would be suspended from the roof of the building, halolike, on steel cables attached to reinforced I-beams. The words had come back to him; he spoke them, and Le Corbusier and Lemain and Pingusson listened, making notes on their yellow pads. The suspension design allowed for a longer track than would be possible if the piste were housed inside the building. The sports club would be constructed higher than the surrounding buildings, and the track could hang over their uppermost stories. The roof of the building itself was also the ceiling of the natatorium; Andras bent over the model and demonstrated how it might be retracted in fine weather. Both design elements, the exposed track and the retractable roof, reflected the sports club’s principles of inclusivity and freedom.
When he’d finished, there was a hush in the room. He sent a look of gratitude in the direction of Professor Vago, who refused to acknowledge that he had helped Andras. Then the judges’ questions began: How would a suspended track be kept from bouncing under the runners’ impact? What would happen in a wind? How quickly could the retracted roof be closed again in case of thunderstorms? How did they propose to deal with the problem of housing a hydraulic system in the open space of the natatorium?
Now the words came faster. These were problems Andras and Polaner had discussed and argued about for hours in the studio at night. The supporting cables would be wrapped in thin bands of steel to make them rigid without entirely eliminating their elasticity; a certain degree of spring would cushion the runners’ tread. The track would be braced against the building with support struts to prevent sway. And the hydraulic system would be housed within this closetlike enclosure. After they’d answered all the questions, it seemed to take hours for Pingusson and Lemain and Le Corbusier to inspect the materials and make their notes; even Perret himself insisted upon taking a closer look, muttering to himself as he examined the cross-section of an external wall.
“And who are you, Monsieur Lévi?” Le Corbusier asked finally, lodging his pencil behind his ear.
“I’m a Hungarian, from Konyár, sir,” Andras said.
“Ah. You’re the young man they discovered at the art exhibition. They admitted you to the school based on some linoleum cuts, I understand.”
“Yes,” Andras said, and cleared his throat self-consciously.
“And you, Monsieur Polaner?” Pingusson asked. “From Kraków? They tell me you’ve got a taste for engineering.”
“I do, sir,” Polaner said.
“Well, I’d call the design superb but impractical,” Le Corbusier said. “The zoning is the problem. You’ll never get Parisians to hang a track off a building. It looks a bit like what ladies used to wear under their dresses in the eighteenth century. Those whatever-you-call-them. Martingale. Frimple.”
“More like some sort of outlandish hat,” said Pingusson. “But it’s an awfully good use of urban space.”
“Rather fantastical,” Lemain said. “The building itself is well designed, though. And the wood ornamentation is a fine element. Echoes of gymnasium parquet.”
And then the judges moved on to the next set of designs. It was over. Andras and Polaner exhanged a look of exhausted satisfaction: Their design, if imperfect, had at least been worthy of praise. As the other students surged past them, Rosen clapped them on the shoulders and kissed them on both cheeks.
“Congratulations, boys,” he said. “You’ve created the first ever architectural frimple. If I weren’t entirely broke, I’d treat you both to a drink.”
The next morning, when Andras came in through the blue courtyard doors-the same threshold he’d crossed nearly two years earlier as a novice student-he was greeted by cheers all around. The students in the courtyard clapped and began to chant his name. On a chipped wooden chair in the corner of the yard, Polaner sat in state: Students crowded around him, and a gold medal hung from his neck. Someone had draped the tricolor over his shoulders. A photographer bent to a camera and shot pictures. When Rosen heard the new round of cheers, he rushed over to Andras and took him by the arm.
“Where have you been?” he said. “Everyone’s been waiting for you! You won, idiot. You and your adorable partner. You won the Grand Prix. Your medal’s hanging on display in the amphitheater.”
Andras ran to the amphitheater, where he saw that it was true: Their Sportsclub Saint-Germain was crowned with a gold-stamped certificate and flanked by a medal on a tricolor ribbon. There were the judges’ signatures on the certificate, Le Corbusier’s and Lemain’s and Pingusson’s. He stood alone for a long moment, trying to believe it; he took the medal and turned it over in his hand. It was heavy and burnished, with a portrait of Emile Trélat sculpted in low relief upon its surface. Grand Prix du Amphithéâtre, it read; on the back it was inscribed with Andras’s and Polaner’s names, and the year, 1939. He put the medal on, the weight of it pulling the tricolor ribbon against his neck. He had to see Polaner, and then Professor Vago.
“Lévi,” someone said, and he turned.
It was a pair of students who’d entered the contest, two third-year men. Andras had seen them around the École Spéciale but didn’t know them; neither of them had been among his studio group or his third-year mentors. The tall fellow with ink-black hair was a Frédéric something; the one with the broad chest and horn-rimmed glasses went by the nickname of Noirlac. The tall one reached for Andras’s medal and gave it a yank.
“Nice trinket,” he said. “It’s a shame you had to cheat to get it.”
“Pardon?” Andras said. He didn’t trust his comprehension of the man’s French.
“I said it’s a shame you had to cheat to get it.”
Andras narrowed his eyes at Frédéric. “What’s this about?”
“Everyone knows they gave it to you out of pity,” said the one called Noirlac. “They felt bad for your little friend, the one who got buggered and beat up. It wasn’t enough that Lemarque had to hang himself over it. They had to make a public statement.”
“We all know you work for Lemain,” said the other. “And don’t think we don’t know about Pingusson and your scholarship. We know it was fixed. You’d better admit it to yourself. You’d never win for a monstrosity like that, not unless you were someone’s little pet.”
A muted cheer reached them from the courtyard. Andras could just make out Rosen’s voice as he delivered a laudatory speech. “If you touch Polaner, I’ll kill you,” he said. “Both of you.”
The taller man laughed. “Defending your lover?”
“What’s going on, gentlemen?” It was Vago, striding across the amphitheater with a sheaf of plans under his arm. “Congratulating the winner, are we?”
“That’s right, sir,” said Frédéric, and grabbed Andras’s hand as if to shake it. Andras pulled away.
Vago seemed to take in Andras’s expression and the mocking smiles of the third-year students. “I’d like a word with Monsieur Lévi,” he said.
“Of course, Professor,” said Noirlac, and made a half bow to Vago. He took his friend’s arm and crossed the amphitheater, turning to give Andras a salute at the courtyard door.
“Bastards,” Andras said.
Vago put his hands on his hips and sighed. “I know those two,” he said. “I’d kill them myself if it wouldn’t get me fired.”
“Just tell me. Is it true? Did you give us the prize to make a point?”
“What point?”
“About Polaner.”
“Of course,” said Vago. “To make the point that he’s an excellent designer and draftsman. As are you. The entry isn’t perfect, of course, but it was by far the most innovative and well-realized in the contest. The decision was unanimous. All the judges agreed, for once. But it was Pingusson who was your biggest champion. He said it was worth every cent to keep you here. In fact, he promised to increase the amount of your fellowship. He’s keen to get you more studio time.”
“But this design,” Andras said, tweaking the hanging track with one finger. “It’s absurd, isn’t it? Le Corbusier was right when he said a thing like this could never be built.”
“Maybe not in Paris,” Vago said. “Maybe not this decade. But Le Corbusier’s been making notes and sketches for a project in India, and he says he’d like to exchange some ideas with you and Polaner.”
Andras squinted at him in disbelief. “He wants to exchange ideas with us?”
“Why shouldn’t he? The best ideas often come out of the classroom. After all, you haven’t spent years dealing with planning commissions and zoning boards and neighborhood associations. You’re more likely to imagine something impossible, which is how the most interesting buildings come into being.”
Andras turned the medal over in his hands. The third-years’ insults were still fresh in his mind, his temples still beating with adrenaline.
“Jealous men will always try to take you down,” Vago said. “It’s the way of humankind.”
“A fine species we are,” Andras said.
“Oh, indeed. There’s no saving us. Eventually we’ll destroy ourselves. But in the meantime we’ve got to have shelter, so the architect’s work goes on.”
At that moment Rosen appeared at the entrance to the amphitheater. “What’s keeping you?” he called. “The photographer’s waiting.”
Vago put a hand on Andras’s shoulder and led him to the courtyard, where a group had gathered in a grassy corner. The judges had emerged to be photographed with the winners; Polaner stood between Le Corbusier and Pingusson, a look of deep solemnity on his pale boyish face, and Lemain stood beside them, proud and grave. The photographer placed Andras next to Le Corbusier, and Vago on his other side. Andras adjusted the medal around his neck and drew his shoulders back. As he looked toward the lens of the camera, still trying to shake off his anger, he saw Noirlac and Frédéric watching him, their arms crossed over their chests, reminding him of what seemed to be one of the central truths of his life: that in any moment of happiness there was a reminder of bitterness or tragedy, like the ten plague drops spilled from the Passover cup, or the taste of wormwood in absinthe that no amount of sugar could disguise. And that was why, even though it was the only photograph he’d ever have of himself at the École Spéciale, he would never hang that picture on his wall. When he looked at it he could see nothing but his own anger, and the source of it staring at him from the crowd.
That summer, the constant subject of discussion was the fate of the Free City of Danzig. The papers reported that Germany was smuggling armaments and troops across the border; officers of the Reich were reported to be training the local Nazis in war maneuvers. While Britain and France stalled over a military-assistance agreement with Russia, the radio carried rumors of deeper cooperation between Berlin and Moscow. In early July, Chamberlain pledged Britain’s help to Poland if Danzig were threatened, and on Bastille Day the Champs-Élysées bristled with French and British tanks, armored cars, artillery. Two days later the Polish flag mysteriously appeared above the offices of the Reich in Breslau. How that act of defiance had been accomplished, no one could guess; the building must have been crawling with guards. Polaner, who’d had a string of anxious letters from his parents all summer, was sick with the need for good news. Having received that piece, however small, he proposed that they all go to the Blue Dove and let him buy them drinks. It was a hot July afternoon, the streets still littered with Bastille Day trash, the sidewalks awash in greasy bags and empty beer bottles and tiny French and British flags. When they arrived at the Blue Dove they found Ben Yakov already installed at a table with a bottle of whiskey before him. A look of drink-eased resignation had settled over his features.
“Good afternoon, darlings,” he said. “Have a drink on me.”
“The drinks are on me today,” Polaner said. “Did you hear about the Polish flag?”
“I heard it’s scheduled to be replaced,” Ben Yakov said. “I hear they’ve come up with something in black and white on a red ground. Rather ugly, if you ask me.” He drained his glass and filled it again. “Congratulate me, boys, I’m going to see the rabbi.”
They’d never seen Ben Yakov drunk in public. His handsome mouth looked blurred around the edges, as if someone had been trying to erase it.
“Going to see the rabbi?” Rosen said. “Why should we congratulate you for that?”
“Because it’ll make me a free man. I’m going to get a divorce.”
“What?”
“An old-fashioned Jewish divorce. I can do it, you see, because we’ve got a note from the doctor saying Ilana’s barren. That means we qualify. How’s that for chivalry? She can’t bear children, so I can cast her off.” He bent over his glass and rubbed his eyes. “Have a drink, will you?”
None of it was news to Andras. For the past month, Ilana had been living under Klara’s roof again, occupying the other half of Klara’s bed. Klara had offered to take care of her while she recovered; Ilana had gone to the rue de Sévigné when she’d left the hospital, and hadn’t gone home since. She was miserable, she told Klara; she’d come to understand that Ben Yakov didn’t love her, at least not as he once had. She understood that he felt caged by their marriage. She’d long suspected that he was seeing someone else. When Ben Yakov went to visit her at Klara’s, they would sit together in the front room, scarcely saying a word; what was there to say? She was often inconsolable with grief over the baby, a grief Ben Yakov was surprised to find he shared; he grieved, too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself. And then there was the unanswerable question of what might be next for Ilana. On the other side of her recovery was a blank page. There was nothing to keep her in Paris now, but she didn’t know how her parents would receive her if she went home. Her letters to them had gone unanswered.
Andras hadn’t mentioned Ilana’s situation in his own letters to Tibor. He hadn’t wanted to worry his brother, nor, on the other hand, to raise Tibor’s hopes. But a week earlier, Ben Yakov and Ilana had met at Klara’s to discuss how they might extract themselves from their marriage. Ilana told Ben Yakov they might be granted a divorce if the doctor would attest that she could no longer bear children. It was uncertain whether that was really true, but the doctor might be persuaded to say so. Ben Yakov had agreed to pursue that avenue. Once they’d made the decision they both seemed to feel some relief. Ilana’s health began to improve, and Ben Yakov went back to the studio to make up the work he’d missed that spring. But now that the first meeting with the rabbi was approaching, Ben Yakov had broken down. The possibility of divorce would soon become reality, evidence of what a disaster he’d made of Ilana’s life, and his own.
As the four of them drank together, Ben Yakov laid himself bare without shame. Not only had his marriage with Ilana fallen apart; the beautiful Lucia, tired of waiting, had left him too. She was spending the summer under the tutelage of a master architect in New York, and there were rumors that the architect had fallen in love with her and that she might be leaving the École Spéciale for a design school in Rhode Island. The rumors had arrived through a string of mutual friends. Lucia herself hadn’t written to Ben Yakov since she’d left Paris.
At the end of the evening, after they’d spilled onto the sidewalk outside the Blue Dove, Andras volunteered to take Ben Yakov home. Rosen and Polaner clapped Ben Yakov on the back and expressed the hope that he’d feel better in the morning.
“Oh, I’ll feel grand,” Ben Yakov said, and the next moment he bent over beside a lamppost and sent a stream of vomit into the gutter.
Andras gave him a handkerchief and helped him clean himself; then he put an arm around Ben Yakov’s shoulders and led him home. At the door there was some fumbling for a key, and as Ben Yakov searched he came dangerously close to crying. At last he located the key in his shirt pocket, and Andras helped him upstairs. The place looked exactly as Andras had imagined: as though the person responsible for making it habitable had departed weeks before. Dirty plates choked the sink, the geraniums on the windowsill had died, newspapers and books lay everywhere, and on the unmade bed there were croissant flakes and piles of discarded clothes. Andras made Ben Yakov sit in the chair beside the bed while he stripped the linens and replaced them with fresh ones. He made Ben Yakov take off his soiled shirt. That was as much as he could manage; the rest of the place saddened and daunted him. Worst of all was the little table with its empty teacups and its crust of bread: Andras recognized a tablecloth edged with forget-me-nots, Klara’s wedding gift to the bride.
Ben Yakov crawled into bed and turned off the light, and Andras picked his way to the door. The ancient lock confounded him. He bent to it and fiddled with a rusted latch.
“Lévi,” Ben Yakov said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Andras said.
“Listen,” he said. “Write to your brother.”
Andras paused with his hand on the doorknob.
“I’m not an idiot,” Ben Yakov said. “I know what happened between the two of them. I know what happened on the train.”
“What do you mean?” Andras said.
“Please, don’t-don’t try to shield me, or whatever it is you’re doing. It’s insulting.”
“How do you know what happened on the train?”
“I know. I could tell something was wrong when they got here. And she confessed, one night when I’d said some cruel things to her. But it was already obvious. She tried-to fight it, I mean. She’s a good girl. But she fell in love with him. That’s all. I’m not the sort of man he is, Andras, you ought to know that.” He stopped and said, “Oh, God-,” and then pulled the chamber pot from beneath the bed and threw up into it. He stumbled to the bathroom in the hallway and returned, wiping his face with a towel. “Write him,” he said. “Tell him to come see her. But don’t tell me what happens, all right? I don’t want to know. And I can’t see you for a while. I’m sorry, really. I know it’s not your fault.” He got into bed, turned over to face the wall. “Go home now, Lévi.” His voice was muffled against the pillow. “Good of you to look after me. I’d have done the same for you.”
“I know you would have,” Andras said. He tried the stubborn latch again; this time the door opened. He went home to the rue des Écoles, took out a notebook, and began to draft a letter to his brother.
ELISABET’S ELOPEMENT was not really an elopement in the true sense of the word; by the time it happened, Klara had known of her impending departure for months. Paul Camden came to lunch nearly every Sunday afternoon in his quest to earn her trust and favor. In his slow French with its flattened vowels, he told Klara about his family home in Connecticut, where his mother raised and trained show horses; about his father’s position as the vice president of an energy conglomerate in New York; about his sisters, who were both in school at Radcliffe and who would love Elisabet. But the problem remained of what Camden père and mère would think of their son’s returning home with a moneyless Jewish girl of obscure parentage. The best solution, Paul thought, was for the wedding to take place before they left for New York. It would be simpler to travel as husband and wife; once they reached America, the fait accompli of their marriage would make everything clear to his parents, whatever their objections. Paul believed they would welcome Elisabet once they’d gotten to know her. But Klara begged that they wait to get married until after they’d arrived, until Paul had revealed everything and had a chance to bring them around to the idea. If he married Elisabet without consulting them first, Klara was certain they’d react by cutting off their son. In any case, as a safeguard against that eventuality, Paul had begun saving half of the astonishing sum his father’s accountant sent him each month. He had moved to a smaller apartment and begun to take his meals at a student dining club, rather than having them sent in by restaurants; he had stopped adding to his wardrobe and had bought used books for his classes. He had learned these economies from Andras, who had found him to be profoundly ignorant of the most basic principles of frugality. He had never heard of buying day-old bread, for example, and had never polished his own shoes nor washed his own shirts; he was amazed that a man might have his hat reblocked rather than buy a new one.
“But everyone will see it’s your old hat,” he protested, and then repeated the last words in English: “Old hat. In the States, it’s a pejorative. It’s what you call something predictable or trite or démodé.”
“All you have to do is change the hatband,” Andras said. “No one will know it’s your ohld het. If you think anyone looks that closely at what you’re wearing, you’re mistaken.”
Paul laughed. “I suppose you’re right, old man,” he said, and let Andras show him where a hat could be taken to be reblocked.
Often, on those Sundays when Paul came to lunch, Andras would see Klara retreat into watchful silence. He knew she was observing her daughter’s intended, sizing him up, taking note of how he treated Elisabet, how he responded to Andras’s queries about his work, how he spoke to Mrs. Apfel as she served the káposzta. But she was also watching Elisabet. There seemed to be a kind of urgency in her watching, as if she had to record every nuance of Elisabet’s existence. She seemed acutely aware that these were the last days her daughter would live under her roof. There was nothing Klara could do to stop it; Elisabet had been on her way out for years, slowly but unmistakably, and now she would be gone for good, across the ocean, into a fledgling marriage with a non-Jewish man whose parents might not accept her. To make matters worse, there at the same table sat Ilana di Sabato, newly divorced: evidence of how a marriage between two very young people might go wrong. Ilana sat in lonely despair, hardly touching her food; she’d cut her gorgeous dark braid at the nape of her neck when she’d married Ben Yakov, and her hair clung forlornly to her head like the kind of close-fitting cap that had been fashionable a decade earlier. Old hat, Andras thought. It was painful to look at her. He had not yet received a reply to his letter, and didn’t want to speak to her about Tibor until he did.
Elisabet would sail at the beginning of August, and many things had to be prepared for the voyage. Her clothes were a schoolgirl’s clothes; she had to assemble the wardrobe of a married woman. Paul insisted on contributing to the preparations, at first presenting Elisabet with the kind of extravagances he had only ever thought of as necessities: a linen tennis costume with a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes; a pearl necklace with a platinum clasp; a set of traveling cases made of fawn-colored leather, her initials stamped upon them in gold. Each purchase devastated the savings he’d accumulated by practicing the small economies Andras had taught him. At last Klara suggested, as gently as one could, that Paul might ask her how the money might best be spent. Elisabet needed things like cambric slips, nightgowns, walking shoes. One of the fillings in her teeth had to be replaced. She wanted her long hair cut into a short style. All of these things cost money and took time. When Andras left in the evenings, Klara would always have her sewing basket out; he imagined her as a kind of Penelope by proxy, each night tearing out the work she’d done so that Elisabet would never have to marry. It terrified her, she’d told him, to think of Elisabet setting out across the ocean while Europe stood on the brink of war. It was not uncommon for civilian ships to be torpedoed. Couldn’t Elisabet wait another few months at least, until the situation in Poland had quieted down and the problems with the Anglo-French Mutual Assistance Agreement with Russia had been resolved? Did Paul and Elisabet really have to sail in August, that month when wars traditionally began? But Elisabet had insisted that if she waited, France might indeed go to war; then the journey would be impossible. The subject had sparked arguments that had brought Klara and Elisabet close to emotional collapse. Andras had the sense that this was their last great opportunity to demonstrate their love in the way they’d practiced most, through a struggle in which neither party would yield and neither could win, a conflict whose subject was not the matter at hand but the complicated nature of mother-and-daughterhood itself.
On the rare nights when Klara came to him at his garret during those weeks, she made love to him with an insistence that seemed to have nothing to do with him at all. He had never imagined he might be so lonely in her arms; he wanted her unfocused eyes to settle upon him. When he stopped her once and said, “Look at me,” she rolled away from him and broke into tears. Then she apologized, and he held her, unable to suppress the selfish wish that this would all be over soon. On the other side of Elisabet’s departure was the fulfillment of the promise they’d made last fall: They, too, would be married, and would live together at last. In her grief over the loss of her child, Klara had ceased to talk about what would happen once Elisabet was gone.
…
21 July 1939
Modena
Dear Andras,
I am sorry, truly sorry, to hear that the marriage between Ilana and Ben Yakov has ended so sadly. It grieves me to consider the role I may have played in their unhappiness. If regret could mend that error, it would have been undone long ago.
When I first received your letter I thought I couldn’t possibly come to Paris. How could I face Ilana, I asked myself, knowing how I had wronged her? Love insists upon its own expression; it tells us it is right simply by virtue of being love. But we are human beings and must decide what is right. My feelings for Ilana were so acute that I failed to govern them. I hardly deserve a second chance to prove myself her friend; still less to plead my case as a lover.
But, Andráska-and perhaps you’ll consider me a scoundrel for saying so-I find that my feelings for her are unchanged. How my pulse raced when I read that she’d asked after me! How it moved me to hear that she’d spoken of me with tenderness! You know me too well to have mentioned these things lightly; you must have known what they would mean to me.
And so, finally, I am coming. I am ashamed, but I am coming. At least you’ll never have reason to doubt my constancy; neither, I hope, shall Ilana. By the time you receive this letter I will have reached Paris. I will take a room at the Hôtel St. Jacques, where you can find me on Friday.
With love,
Your T IBOR
It was Saturday morning by the time Andras got his brother’s letter. He had been at the architecture firm all night, helping Lemain complete a set of drawings for a client. The letter was sitting on the front table, along with a handwritten note from Tibor: Andras: Came to see you this morning. Waited until 9. Can’t wait longer! I must try to see her. Meet me at Klara’s. T.
He knocked on the concierge’s door. There was a long silence; then came an unintelligible French curse and approaching footsteps. The concierge came out in a grime-stained apron and sooty work gloves, a stripe of grease across her brow.
“Tsk!” she said. “A visitor arrives with great commotion at an inconvenient hour. What a surprise: He’s a relative of yours.”
“When did my brother leave?”
“Not three minutes ago. I was cleaning the oven, as you can see.”
“Three minutes ago!”
“There’s no need to shout, young man.”
“Excuse me,” Andras said. He stuffed the note into his pocket and charged out into the street. The door slammed behind him; the concierge’s muffled curse followed him down the block. He took off at a run toward the Marais. It was a bright, hot morning; the streets were already crowded with tourists and their cameras, families out for Saturday strolls, lovers walking arm in arm. At the Pont Louis-Philippe, Andras glimpsed a familiar hat in the crush of the crowd. He called his brother’s name, and the man turned.
They met at the center of the bridge. Tibor seemed to have grown thinner since Andras had last seen him; the angles of his cheekbones were sharper now, the shadows beneath his eyes darker. When they embraced, he seemed made of a substance lighter than flesh.
“Are you all right?” Andras asked, studying his features.
“I haven’t slept since I got your letter,” Tibor said.
“When did you arrive?”
“Last night. I came to your building, but you weren’t there.”
“I was at work all night. I just got your note.”
“So you haven’t spoken to her? She doesn’t know I’m in Paris?”
“No. She doesn’t even know I wrote to you.”
“How is she, Andras?”
“Just as before. Very sad. But I think that will change shortly.”
Tibor gave his brother a bemused smile. “If you’re so sure she’ll be glad to see me, why did you chase me all the way here?”
“I suppose I wanted to see you first!” Andras said, and laughed.
“Well?” Tibor spread his arms.
“Hideous as ever. And me?”
“Shoes untied. Ink spots on your shirt. And you haven’t shaved.”
“Perfect. On our way, then.” He took Tibor’s arm and turned him toward the rue de Sévigné. But Tibor didn’t move. He put a hand on the bridge rail and looked down into the Seine.
“I’m not sure I can do this,” he said. “I’m petrified.”
“Of course you are,” Andras said. “But now that you’re here, you have to do it.” He cocked his head toward the Marais. “Come on.”
They walked together, both of them lightheaded from lack of sleep. On their way, Tibor bought a bouquet of peonies from a corner florist. By the time they reached Klara’s corner, Andras had absorbed his brother’s misgivings; he worried that they should have sent word that they were coming. He looked through the windowpanes into the tranquil light of the studio, still empty before the first class, and regretted their intrusion upon the quiet of Saturday morning at the Morgensterns’.
But all was already in chaos there. The front door opened at Andras’s touch; from upstairs came the sounds of some disaster-Klara’s voice raised in panic, Mrs. Apfel shouting. For an instant Andras thought they were too late: in her despair, Ilana di Sabato had taken her own life, and Klara had just now discovered her body. He grabbed the banister and raced up the stairs, and Tibor followed.
But Ilana was nowhere to be seen. It was Mrs. Apfel who met them at the top of the stairs. “She’s gone!” she said. “The little vixen ran away!”
“Who?” Andras said. “What happened?”
“She’s gone off to America with her Monsieur Camden. Left her mother a note. I could strangle that child! I could wring her neck.”
From down the hall came a great clattering of something bulky and rigid. Andras went to Klara’s room to find that she had just pulled a suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe. She threw it onto the unmade bed, flung it open, and pulled her driving coat out of its brown paper.
“What are you doing?” Andras said.
She looked at him, her lovely features raked raw by grief. “Going after her,” she said, and thrust a note into his hands. In her round childish script, Elisabet explained that she must go, that she couldn’t wait any longer, that she was afraid the situation in Poland might push France toward war before they could sail. They had left Paris by train that morning; they would depart for New York the next day on the S.S. Île de France, and would be married by the captain on board. She apologized-and here the letters were blurred-and the next thing he could read was might be easier for everyone if I, and then another illegible line. Will write when I arrive, the note concluded. Thanks for trousseau and everything else. Love, &c.
“When did you get this?”
“This morning. All her things are gone.”
“And you’re going to try to catch her?”
“I can follow her to Le Havre. If we drive, we can get there by this afternoon.”
Andras sighed. The bond between Klara and Elisabet would be a difficult one to break; he could see why Elisabet might want to get a running start. But it made him furious to think of Elisabet moving her things out quietly in the night, those carefully packed crates of clothing and linen Klara had assembled for her. “Did you hire a car?” he asked.
“I had Mrs. Apfel call. It should arrive in a moment.”
“Klara-”
“Yes, I know.” She sat down on the bed, holding the driving coat on her lap. “She’s a grown girl. She’s going to leave anyway. I ought to allow her to go off and do what she wants to do.”
“Are you going to try to stop her? Do you think you can convince her not to sail?”
“No,” she said, and sighed. “But since she’s determined to go, I’d like to see her off. I’d like to say goodbye to my daughter.”
He understood, of course. Elisabet’s war of independence was over; what Klara wanted now was to negotiate the peace in person, rather than from opposite sides of the Atlantic. If there was a remnant of struggle in her capitulation, he understood that, too. She had been fighting this battle for years, and couldn’t so easily give up the habit.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “Or I won’t, if you’d prefer that.”
“I want you to come. Please come.”
“But Klara, there’s something else I have to tell you,” he said. “Tibor’s here.”
“Tibor? Your brother is here?”
“Yes. He’s here right now, in the apartment.”
“You didn’t tell me he’d written back!”
“I didn’t get the letter until this morning.”
“Ilana,” she said, and they went down the hall to deliver the news.
But Ilana and Tibor had already found each other. They were sitting together on the sofa in the front room. On her face was a look of disbelieving joy; on his, relief and exhaustion. They were not unhappy to learn that Andras and Klara were going to Le Havre, and that they would have to spend the day in each other’s company.
“But you’ll call us when you get to Le Havre,” Tibor said. “Let us know if you’ve found her.”
From downstairs came the double blast of a klaxon; the rental agency had delivered the car, and it was time to go. Mrs. Apfel handed over a basket of things she’d packed for the journey. Minutes later they were off, weaving their way through the streets of Paris, Andras white-knuckled in the passenger seat, Klara resolute and grim behind the wheel. By the time they hit the countryside, Klara’s forehead had relaxed. Morning sun flooded the rippling lavender fields ahead of them, the scent of gasoline a thrilling counterpoint to that sweetness. They didn’t talk above the wind and engine noise, but when they reached a stretch of open road she took his hand.
There was no secrecy to Paul and Elisabet’s plans; they were staying at the very hotel they’d settled upon a month earlier when it was decided they would leave from Le Havre. Andras and Klara went into the high white lobby and inquired at the desk. They were told to wait, and then were told to follow the bellman. The couple themselves were seated on a veranda overlooking the port, where the S.S. Île de France could be seen in her strict nautical uniform, her crimson smokestacks circumscribed in black. Klara rushed across the veranda, calling Elisabet’s name, and Elisabet rose from her chair with an expression of surprise and relief. Andras had never before seen her look so happy to see her mother. And then she did a remarkable thing: She threw her arms around Klara’s neck and burst into tears.
“Forgive me!” Elisabet cried. “I shouldn’t have left the way I did. I didn’t know what else to do!” And she wept on her mother’s shoulder.
Paul watched the scene with evident embarrassment; he gave Andras a sheepish nod of greeting and then ordered a round of drinks for everyone.
“What were you thinking?” Klara said when they’d sat down together. She touched Elisabet’s face. “Couldn’t you have allowed me the comfort of an ordinary goodbye? Did you think I’d lock you in your room and keep you there?”
“I don’t know,” Elisabet said, still crying. “I’m sorry.” She twisted the shorn ends of her hair self-consciously; without the long yellow braid, her head looked oddly small and bereft. The bob drew attention to her pale naked mouth. “I was frightened, too. I didn’t know if I could bear to say goodbye.”
“And you,” Klara said, turning to Paul. “Was this how you left your mother when you came to France?”
“Ah-no, Madame.”
“Ah-no, indeed! In the future you’ll treat me with the respect you’d give your own mother, if you please.”
“I apologize, Madame.” He looked genuinely chastened. Andras wondered if his own mother had ever spoken to him in such a tone. He tried to conjure up an image of Paul’s mother, but all he could muster was a jodhpur-clad version of the Baroness Kaczynska, a sixteenth-century aristocrat whose complicated history and lineage he’d had to study at school in Debrecen.
“Do you really mean to be married by a sea captain?” Klara asked her daughter. “Is that what you’d like?”
“It’s what we’ve decided,” Elisabet said. “I think it’s exciting.”
“So I’m not to see you married, then.”
“You’ll see me after I’m married. When we come back to visit.”
“And when do you imagine that will be?” Klara said. “When do you think you’ll be able to buy passage back across an ocean? Particularly if your husband’s parents don’t accept your union?”
“We thought maybe you’d want to come live in the States,” Paul said. “To be close to the children and all, when we have children.”
“And what about my own children?” Klara said. “It might not be an easy thing for me to dash across an ocean.”
“What children?”
She looked at Andras and took his hand. “Our children.”
“Maman!” Elisabet said. “You can’t mean you plan to have children with-!” She cocked a thumb at Andras.
“We may. We’ve discussed it.”
“But you’re un femme d’un certain age!”
Klara laughed. “We’re all of a certain age, aren’t we? You, for example, are of an age at which it’s impossible to understand how thirty-two might seem like the beginning of a life, rather than the end of one.”
“But I’m your child,” Elisabet said, looking as though she might cry again.
“Of course you are,” Klara said, and tucked one of Elisabet’s short blond locks behind her ear. “That’s why I came here to you. I couldn’t let you go across the ocean without saying a proper goodbye.”
“Mesdames,” Andras said. “Pardon me. I think Mr. Camden and I will take a walk now and leave you alone.”
“That’s right,” Paul said. “We’ll go down to see the ship.”
It had all become rather overwhelming; there had been too much crying already for Paul’s taste, and Andras had become lightheaded at the mention of his future children. It was a relief to them both to take leave of Klara and Elisabet and strike out on their own.
They walked through a street market on their way to the docks, past men selling mackerel and sole and langoustines, boxes of myrtilles, net sacks of summer squashes, tiny yellow plums by the dozen. Families on holiday thronged the streets, so many children in sailor suits they might have formed a child navy. Self-consciously, as if the outpouring of emotion they’d just witnessed had threatened their masculinity, Andras and Paul talked of ships and of sports, and then, as they passed an English navy ship docked in one of the enormous berths, of the prospect of war. Everyone had hoped that Chamberlain’s declaration of support for Poland might lead to a few weeks of calm over the Danzig question, and perhaps even a peaceable settlement in the end, but Hitler had just concluded a meeting at Berchtesgaden with the leader of Danzig’s Nazi Party and had sent a warship into the Free City’s port. If Germany claimed Danzig, then England and France would go to war. That week, French aircraft had staged a mock attack on London to test the readiness of England’s air-defense system. Some Londoners had thought war had already broken out, and three people had been killed in a rush to the air-raid shelters.
“What do you think America will do?” Andras asked.
Paul shrugged. “Roosevelt will issue an ultimatum, I guess.”
“Hitler doesn’t fear Roosevelt. Look what happened last April.”
“Well, I don’t claim to know much about it,” Paul said, raising his hands in a pantomime of self-defense. “I’m just a painter. Most days I don’t even read the news.”
“Your fiancée is Jewish,” Andras said. “Her family is here. The war will affect her, whether America gets involved or not.”
They stood in silence for a long moment, looking at the ship with its spiny encrustation of guns. “What kind of service would you choose, if you had to fight?” Paul asked.
“Not the navy, that’s for certain,” Andras said. “The first time I saw the sea was a year ago. And nothing in a ditch. No trenches. I could learn to fly a plane, though. That’s what I’d like to do.”
Paul broke into a grin. “Me too,” he said. “I’ve always thought it would be fantastic to fly planes.”
“But I wouldn’t want to have to kill anyone,” Andras said.
“Right,” Paul said. “That’s the problem. I wouldn’t mind being a hero, though. I’d like to win medals.”
“Me too,” Andras said. It felt good, if slightly shameful, to admit it.
“See you in the air, then,” Paul said, and laughed, but there was something forced about it, as if the possibility of a war and his involvement in it had suddenly become real to him.
They’d reached the S.S. Île de France, its bulk towering above them like the leading edge of a glacier. Its hull was glossy with new paint; each letter of its name was as tall and as broad as a man. The sea sloshed around it in its berth, sending up a rich stink of dead fish and oil and dock weed, and something briny and calciferous that must have been the smell of seawater itself. The ship rose fifteen stories from the waterline; they could count five terraces from where they stood. The decks teemed with stevedores, sailors, chambermaids with their arms full of linen. Hundreds were making the final preparations for the departure of a small town’s worth of people on a seventeen-day voyage. There would be fifteen hundred passengers on board, Paul told him; there were five ballrooms, a cinema, a shooting gallery, a vast gymnasium, an indoor swimming pool, a hundred lifeboats. The ship was nearly eight hundred feet long and would travel at twenty-four knots. And on board was a surprise for Elisabet, one final extravagance: They had a stateroom with a private balcony, and he’d arranged for the delivery of three dozen white roses and a case of champagne.
“At least you got your hat reblocked,” Andras said. “Think what it would have cost to buy a new one.”
That evening they all dined together on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the water. They ate fresh clams in tomato broth and whole fish roasted with lemons and olives, drank two bottles of wine, talked about their childhood fancies and the exotic places they wanted to see before they died: India, Japan, Morocco. It was almost like a holiday. Klara was in high spirits for the first time in weeks, as if by having found Elisabet she might still avert the long-dreaded separation. But the new arrangements remained in place: Elisabet and Paul would sail in the morning. And as the evening went on, Andras became aware of a familiar tautness inside him, a coil that had been winding itself tighter by the day: It was the fear that once Elisabet had gone, Klara would somehow vanish too, as if the tension between them were what anchored them both to the earth.
At the hotel after dinner, he and Klara parted ways for the night. She would sleep in Elisabet’s suite while Paul and Andras shared a simple room under the eaves. As Klara said bonne nuit she pressed a hand to his cheek like a promise; that night he fell asleep with the hope that the life they made together might be a balm for her grief. But when he went downstairs at dawn he found her standing alone on the veranda, her driving coat draped around her shoulders, watching as the pink light climbed the smokestacks of the Île de France. He stood at the French doors for a long moment without approaching her. A tide was turning. Her daughter was leaving. There was nothing he could ever do to replace what would be taken away.
At eight o’clock they went to the docks to say goodbye to Paul and Elisabet. The ship would sail at noon; the passengers were to board by nine. They had bought Elisabet a bouquet of violets to take on board with her, and a dozen fancy pastries, and a cylinder of yellow streamers for her to set free when the ship pulled away. She wore a straw hat with a red ribbon, and her blue eyes were feverish with the prospect of the voyage.
Paul was anxious to get on board, anxious to show Elisabet what he’d planned for her. But he insisted on having the ship’s photographer take a picture of the four of them together on the dock, the Île de France looming in the background. Then there was a flurry about the trunks, some article of clothing that had to be removed at the last moment. Finally, at the appointed hour, a volcanic horn-blast sounded from somewhere near the summit of the ship, and the passengers who had not yet embarked began to crowd toward the gangway.
The moment had come. Klara drew Paul aside to speak a few final words to him, and Andras and Elisabet were left looking at each other on the dock. He hadn’t considered what he might say to her at this moment. He was surprised to feel as sorry as he did that she was leaving; at dinner the night before, he’d begun to see what she might be like as an adult, and he’d found her to have more of her mother in her than he had imagined.
“I don’t suppose you’re sad to see me go,” she said. But she was looking at him with a hint of humor at the corners of her eyes, and she’d spoken in Hungarian.
“Yes,” Andras said, and took her hand. “Get lost already, will you?”
She smiled. “Make my mother visit us, all right?”
“I will,” Andras said. “I want to see New York.”
“I’ll send you a postcard.”
“Good.”
“I haven’t gotten used to the idea that you’re marrying her,” Elisabet said. “That’ll make you my-”
“Please don’t say it.”
“All right. But listen: If I ever hear you’ve hurt her, I’ll come kill you myself.”
“And if I hear that you’ve hurt that strapping husband of yours,” Andras began, but Elisabet cuffed him on the shoulder, and then it was time for her to say goodbye to Klara. They stood close together, Elisabet bending her head to touch her mother’s. Andras turned away and shook Paul’s hand.
“See you in the funny papers,” Paul said in English. “That’s what they say in the States.” He translated for Andras: “Je te verrai dans les bandes dessinées.”
“Sounds better in French,” Andras said, and Paul had to agree.
The ship’s horn blasted again. Klara kissed Elisabet one last time, and Paul and Elisabet climbed the gangway and disappeared into the crowd of passengers. Klara held Andras’s arm, silent and dry-eyed, until Elisabet appeared at the rail of the ship. Already, hours before the ship would leave the dock, Elisabet was so far away that she was recognizable only by the red ribbon fluttering from the brim of her hat, and by the pinprick of deep purple that was the cone of violets in her hand. The navy blur beside her was Paul in his nautical-looking jacket. Klara took Andras’s hand and gripped it. Her slender face was pale beneath the dark sweep of her hair; in her haste to get to Le Havre she’d neglected to bring a hat. She waved her handkerchief at Elisabet, who waved hers in return.
Three hours later they watched the Île de France slip out toward the flat blue distance of the open sea and sky. How astounding, Andras thought, that a ship that size could shrink to the size of a house, and then to the size of a car; the size of a desk, a book, a shoe, a walnut, a grain of rice, a grain of sand. How astounding that the largest thing he’d ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic.
“Are you ill?” Klara said, putting a hand to his cheek. “What’s wrong?”
But he found it impossible to put the feeling into words. In a moment it had passed, and then it was time for them to go to the car and start for home.
ALL THE TIME Andras and Klara had been at Le Havre, Tibor and Ilana had been together at the apartment on the rue de Sévigné. Tibor related the story the following day as he and Andras walked along the bank of the Seine, watching the long flat barges pass beneath the bridges. Now and then they would catch a strain of Gypsy music that made Andras feel as if they were back in Budapest, as if he might look up and see the gold-traced dome of the Parliament on the right bank, Castle Hill on the left. The afternoon was humid and smelled of damp pavement and river water; in the oblique light Tibor looked haggard with joy. He told Andras that Ilana had known on the train that she was making a mistake, but had felt powerless to stop what had already been set in motion. There was guilt all around, an endless carousel of guilt: her own, Ben Yakov’s, Tibor’s. Each had wronged the others, each had been wronged by the others. It was a miracle that any of them had emerged from the harrowing whirl of it with faculties intact. But Tibor had been protected by his physical distance from Paris, and Ilana had been tended by Klara as if she were her own daughter, and Ben Yakov had talked to Andras in his room at night.
“She’ll come back to Italy with me,” Tibor said. “I’ll take her home to Florence and spend the rest of the summer there. I’d ask her to marry me today if I could, but I’d rather not have her parents consider me the enemy. I’d like to have their permission.”
“That’s brave of you. And what if they refuse?”
“I’ll take my chances. You never know, after all. Maybe they’ll like me.”
They’d crossed the Île de la Cité and the Petit Pont into the Quartier Latin, where they found themselves walking down the rue Saint-Jacques. József’s building lay just ahead; the last time Andras had been there was the night after the Yom Kippur fast. He had seen József a few times since then in passing, but hadn’t crossed the threshhold of his building for months. The time was fast approaching when he and Klara would have to revisit the idea of taking him into their confidence. Now, as he reached the building, he saw that the street door had been propped open with two polished and bestickered leather traveling cases, József’s name and address clearly marked on their sides. A moment later József himself appeared in a summer traveling suit.
“Lévi!” he said. He let his gaze rove over Andras, who felt himself appraised in a bemused, brotherly fashion. “I must say, old boy, you’re looking well. And here’s the other Lévi, the future doctor, if I’m not mistaken. What a shame you’ve caught me just as I’m rushing off. We could have all had a drink. On the other hand, how convenient for me. You can help me get a cab.”
“Off on holiday?” Tibor asked.
“I was supposed to be,” József said, and an unaccustomed expression passed across his features-a look Andras could only have described as chagrin. “I was supposed to meet some friends at Saint-Tropez. Instead I’m off to lovely Budapest.”
“Why?” Andras said. “What’s happened?”
József raised an arm at a passing taxi. It pulled to the curb and the driver climbed out to get József’s bags. “Listen,” József said. “Why don’t the two of you ride to the station with me? I’m going all the way to the Gare du Nord, and it’ll take half an hour in this traffic. Unless you’ve got something better to do.”
“Better than a long hot ride in traffic?” Andras said. “I can’t imagine.”
They climbed into the cab and set off down the rue Saint-Jacques in the direction from which they’d come. József settled a long arm across the back of the seat and turned toward Andras.
“Well, Lévi,” he said. “It’s the damnedest thing, but I think I ought to tell you.”
“What is it?” Andras asked.
“Have you gotten your student visa renewed?”
“Not yet. Why?”
“Don’t be surprised if you run into trouble at the Hungarian Consulate.”
Andras squinted at József; the slanting five o’clock light poured through the windows of the cab and illuminated what he hadn’t seen before: the shadow of worry beneath József’s eyes, the aftertraces of lost sleep. “What kind of trouble?” he said.
“I went to get my visa renewed. I thought I still had a few weeks left. I didn’t think there’d be any difficulty. But then they said they couldn’t do it, not here in France.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Tibor said. “That’s what the consulate does.”
“Not anymore, apparently.”
“If they won’t renew your visa in France, where are they supposed to do it?”
“Back home,” József said. “That’s why I’m going.”
“Couldn’t you get your father to work it out for you?” Andras said. “Couldn’t he use his influence to make someone do something? Or else, if you’ll excuse the vulgarity, couldn’t he just bribe someone?”
“One would think,” József said. “But apparently not. My father’s influence isn’t what it once was. He’s not the president of the bank anymore. He goes to the same office, but he’s got a different title now. Advisory secretary, or some such nonsense.”
“Is it to do with his being Jewish?”
“Of course. What else would it be?”
“And I suppose it’s only Jews who have to go back to Hungary to renew their visas.”
“Does that surprise you, old man?”
Andras pulled his papers from his jacket pocket. “My visa’s still good for another three weeks.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But it’s no good unless you’re taking summer classes. Next term doesn’t count anymore, apparently. You’d better go to the consulate before someone asks for your papers. As far as the authorities are concerned, you’re here illegally now.”
“But that’s impossible. It doesn’t make sense.”
József shrugged. “I wish I could tell you otherwise.”
“I can’t go to Budapest now,” Andras said.
“Truth to tell, I’m almost looking forward to it,” József said. “I’ll have a soak at the Szécsenyi baths, take a coffee at the Gerbeaud, see a few of the boys from gimnázium. Maybe go to the house at Lake Balaton for a while. Then I’ll do what I have to do at the passport office, and I’ll be back by the start of fall term-if there is a fall term, of course, which depends in part on the whims of Herr Hitler.”
Andras collapsed against the cab seat, trying to take in what he’d just heard. Ordinarily he might have welcomed the excuse to go home for a few weeks; after all, he hadn’t seen his parents or Mátyás in two years. But he was supposed to get married; it was supposed to happen while Tibor was still in Paris. He was supposed to move his things to the rue de Sévigné. And then there was the problem of Hitler and Danzig. This was no time to get on a train to Budapest, no time to cross the continent, no time for his visa to be in question. In any case, how could he afford to travel? The cost of a two-way ticket would consume what he’d managed to set aside for Klara’s ring and for tuition in the fall. He didn’t have the savings Tibor had; he hadn’t worked for six years before going to school. He felt suddenly ill, and had to roll down the cab window and turn his face toward the breeze.
“I should have spoken to you sooner,” József said. “We might have traveled together.”
“It’s my fault,” Andras said. “I haven’t been eager to see you since I got blind drunk in your bedroom.”
“Never feel ashamed,” József said. “Not with me. Not for that reason.” And then he turned to Tibor. “What about you?” he said. “How’s medical school? Was it Switzerland?”
“Italy.”
“Of course. So you’re nearly a doctor now.”
“Not quite nearly.”
“And what brings you to town?”
“That’s a long story,” Tibor said. “The short version is something like this: I’m courting someone who was recently married to a friend of Andras’s. I’m glad you’re leaving town before you can make me say more about it.”
József laughed. “That’s grand,” he said. “I wish I had time for the long version.”
They had reached the station, and the driver got out to untie the bags from the roof. József opened his wallet and counted out money. Andras and Tibor slid out after him and helped him carry the bags inside.
“I suppose you’d better go,” Andras said, once they’d consigned the luggage to a porter. “You’ll miss your train.”
“Listen,” József said. “If you do make it to Budapest, look me up. We’ll have a drink. I’ll introduce you to some girls I know.”
“Monsieur Hász, the playboy,” Tibor said.
“Don’t forget it,” József said, and winked. Then he slung his chestnut-colored satchel over his shoulder and loped off into the crowded station.
Before a week had passed, Andras would be obliged to return to the Gare du Nord with his own suitcases, his own satchel. But all he knew, as he and Tibor began the long walk to the rue de Sévigné that evening, was that he had to go to the consulate and explain that he must be granted legal visitor status. Only until the end of the month-only as long as it would take to get a marriage license and wed his bride. Once they were married, wouldn’t he have a claim to French citizenship? Couldn’t he come and go, then, as he wished?
At Klara’s, all the lights were burning and the women were cloistered in the bedroom. Ilana came out to tell Andras he was not to go in; the dressmaker was there, and behind Klara’s door there were secret preparations regarding her wedding gown.
Andras made a noise of dismay. He and Tibor went to the front room and sat down on either side of the sofa, where Tibor pulled his own papers from his trouser pocket and scrutinized the visa.
“Mine’s good until next January,” he said. “And I’ve been enrolled in summer study, though I’m afraid I won’t pass the course I’ve just abandoned.”
“But you’re enrolled. You ought to be all right.”
“But what about you? What will you do?”
“I’ll go to the consulate,” Andras said. “Then I’ll go to the Mairie. I’ll do whatever I have to do. I’ve got to have valid papers before we can get a marriage license.”
From the bedroom came a trio of exclamations, a crescendo of laughter. Tibor folded his papers again and set them on the table. “What’ll you tell her?”
“Nothing yet,” he said. “I don’t want her to worry.”
“We’ll go to the consulate tomorrow,” Tibor said. “If you explain the problem, maybe they’ll grant you an extension. And if they give you trouble, watch out.” He held up his fists in a threatening manner. But his hands were as elegant as a pianist’s, long and lean; his knuckles had the polished look of river stones, and his tendons fanned like the delicate bones of a bird’s wing.
“God help us all,” Andras said, and managed a smile.
The Hungarian Consulate was located not far from the German Embassy, where Ernst vom Rath had met his assassin. At first glance the building might have made an expatriate long for home; its façade was inlaid with mosaics depicting scenes from Budapest and the countryside. But the artist had an uncanny knack for ugliness: his humans seemed to suffer from anemia and bloating, his landscapes from a failure of perspective just noticeable enough to evoke vague nausea in the viewer. Andras had had no appetite for breakfast, in any case; he’d hardly slept the night before. Somehow he’d made it through the previous evening without mentioning the situation to Klara, but she suspected something was wrong. After dinner, as Andras and Tibor were preparing to leave for the Latin Quarter, she’d stopped him in the passageway and asked if he were having misgivings about the wedding.
“Not at all,” he said. “Just the opposite. I’m anxious for it to happen.”
“So am I,” she said, and put her arms around him in the shadowy hall. He’d kissed her, but his mind hadn’t been present. He was thinking about what had troubled him most since the cab ride that afternoon: not the prospect of resistance at the consulate, nor the problem of how he might afford a ticket home, but the fact that the young man rushing to the station had been József Hász, who had always seemed miraculously exempt from the difficulties of ordinary life-József Hász, packed off to Budapest for the sake of a stamp on a document.
The next day at the consulate, a red-haired matron with a Hajdú accent told Andras that his visa had expired when his classes had ended at the beginning of the summer, and that he’d been staying in France illegally for a month and a half; he must leave the country at once if he didn’t want to be arrested. He was given a copy of a form letter stating that he would be permitted to reenter Hungary. That seemed like an unnecessary measure; he was a Hungarian citizen, after all. But he was too upset to consider it for long. He needed to know what to do once he got to Budapest, how to return to Paris as soon as possible. Tibor, who had come along as promised, kept his hands in his pockets and asked polite questions when Andras might have demanded and shouted and raised arguments. Through Tibor’s gentle inquiries, they learned that if Andras carried a letter from the school stating that he was a registered student, and that his scholarship would be renewed in the fall, he ought to be able to get another two-year visa once he was back in Budapest. Any faculty member at the school could write the letter; it was valid as long as it appeared on the school’s letterhead and carried the school’s official seal. Tibor was effusive in his thanks, and the red-haired woman went so far as to say she regretted the inconvenience. But her small watery eyes were impassive as she stamped a red ÉRVÉNYTELEN across Andras’s visa. Expired. Invalid. He had to leave at once. There was no use going to the Mairie to apply for a marriage license; he could be arrested if he showed his expired documents there. The train ticket would exhaust his savings, but he had no choice. He could begin to save again when he returned.
He and Tibor went to the École Spéciale to get the official letter, but when they tried the front doors they found them locked. Of course: The school was closed for the remainder of August. Everyone, even the office attendants, were on vacation; they wouldn’t return until the beginning of September. Andras threw a Hungarian profanity into the hot milky sky.
“How can we get letterhead?” Tibor said. “How can we get an official seal?”
Andras cursed again, but then he had an idea. If there was one thing he knew, it was the architecture of the École Spéciale. It was one of the first designs they’d studied in studio; they had made an exhaustive survey of every aspect of the building, from the stone foundation of the neoclassical entry hall to the pyramidal glass roof of the amphitheater. He knew every door, every window, even the coal-delivery chutes and the network of pneumatic tubes that allowed the central office to send messages to the professors’ studies. He knew, for example, that if you approached the school’s back wall through the Cimetière de Montparnasse, you would find a door behind a cataract of ivy-a door so well hidden it was never locked. It communicated with the courtyard, which allowed access to the office through windows that swung wide on loose hinges. By the aid of those passages Andras and Tibor found themselves inside the vacation-deadened sanctum of the school. A stationer’s box in the office yielded a supply of letterhead and envelopes, and Tibor located the official seal in a secretary’s desk drawer. Neither he nor Andras were adept with a typewriter; it took eight tries to come up with a fair copy of a letter declaring that Andras was indeed a registered student at the École Spéciale, and that he would continue to receive his scholarship in the fall term. They listed Pierre Vago as the author of the letter, and Tibor forged Vago’s signature with a flourish so grand Vago himself might have envied it. Then they embossed the letter with the school’s official stamp.
Before they left, Andras showed Tibor the plaque stating that he’d won the Prix du Amphithéâtre. Tibor stood for a long time looking at the plaque, his arms crossed over his chest. Finally he went back to the office, where he got two blank sheets of letterhead and a pencil. He laid the paper over the plaque and made two rubbings.
“One for our parents,” he said. “One for me.”
They had to go to the telegraph office to wire Mátyás that he was coming. He wouldn’t notify his parents until he got to Budapest; a telegram would only alarm them, and a letter from France might not reach them until he was back in Paris. At the office, worried-looking men and women bent over cards at the writing counters, composing accidentally elegant haiku which took as their subjects birth and love, money and death. Half-written messages littered the floor: MAMAN I RECEIVED-, MATHILDE: REGRET TO INFORM-. While Tibor consulted the train timetable, of which the telegraph office kept a copy, Andras went to the window to get his message card and pencil. The green-visored attendant pointed him toward one of the counters. He went to the appointed place and waited for his brother, who told him that the Danube Express would leave the next morning at seven thirty-three and arrive in Budapest seventy-two hours later.
“What do we write?” Andras asked. “There’s too much to say.”
“How about this,” Tibor suggested, and licked the end of the pencil.
“MÁTYÁS: ARRIVE BUDAPEST THURSDAY AM. PLEASE BATHE. LOVE ANDRAS.”
“Please bathe?”
“You’ll likely have to share a bed with him.”
“Good point. It’s lucky you’re here to help.”
They paid, and the telegram went into the queue. Now Andras had only to go to the rue de Sévigné to tell Klara of his plans. He dreaded the coversation, the news he would have to deliver: their wedding plans disrupted, his visa expired. The confirmation that she’d been right when she guessed something was the matter. With Europe’s fate so uncertain, how could he convince her that their own would be less so? But when they got to the apartment, they found that Klara and Ilana had gone off on a mysterious mission together-to where, Mrs. Apfel wouldn’t say. It was four o’clock; on an ordinary day, Klara would have been teaching. But her establishment had an August hiatus, too. Had it not been for Ilana’s divorce and Elisabet’s departure, they might have gone somewhere themselves, perhaps back to the stone cottage at Nice. Now they were here together in the city, the shops and restaurants closed all around them, the city drowsing in a gold haze. Andras wondered where Klara and Ilana might have gone in secret. They came home a quarter of an hour later with wet hair, their skin pink and luminous, a glow about them; they had been to the Turkish baths in the Sixth Arrondissement. He couldn’t keep from following Klara into her bedroom to watch her dress for dinner. She smiled over her shoulder as she let her summer dress fall to the floor. Her body was cool and pale, her skin velvety as a sage leaf. It was impossible to think of getting on a train that would take him away from her, even for a day.
“Klárika,” he said, and she turned to face him. Her hair had dried in soft tendrils around her neck and forehead; he had such a strong desire for her that he wanted almost to bite her.
“What is it?” She put a hand on the bare skin of his arm.
“Something’s happened,” he said. “I have to go to Budapest.”
She blinked at him in surprise. “But Andras-my God, did someone die?”
“No, no. My visa’s expired.”
“Can’t you just go to the consulate?”
“They’ve changed the rules. József was the one who told me. He had to leave, too-he was on his way to the Gare du Nord when I saw him. I’m here illegally now, according to the government. I have to leave at once. There’s a train tomorrow morning.”
She took a white silk robe and wrapped it around herself, then sat down on the low chair beside the vanity table, her face drained of color.
“Budapest,” she said.
“It’s only for a few days.”
“But what if you run into trouble? What if they won’t renew your visa? What if a war begins while you’re away?” Slowly, pensively, she untied the green ribbon that bound her hair at the nape of her neck, and for a long time she sat holding that bit of silk. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its careful balance. “We were supposed to be married next week. And now you’re going to Hungary, the one place I can’t go with you.”
“I’ll be gone just long enough to get there, see my parents, and come back.”
“I couldn’t stand it if something happened.”
“Do you think I want to go without you?” he said, and pulled her to her feet. “Do you think I can stand the thought of it? Two weeks without you, while Europe’s on the brink of war? Do you think I want that?”
“What if I came with you?”
He shook his head. “We know that’s impossible. We’ve talked about it. It’s too dangerous, particularly now.”
“I never would have considered it while Elisabet was here, but now I don’t need to protect myself for her sake. And Andras-now I know something of what my mother must have suffered when I had to go away. She’s getting older. Who knows when I’ll have a chance to see her? It’s been more than eighteen years. Perhaps I can arrange to meet her in secret, and no one will be the wiser. If we stay a short time, we won’t be in danger-I’ve been Claire Morgenstern for nearly two decades now. I have a French passport. Why would anyone question it? Please, Andras. Let me come.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I couldn’t forgive myself if you were discovered and arrested.”
“Would that be worse than being kept from you?”
“But it’s only two weeks, Klara.”
“Two weeks during which anything might happen!”
“If Europe goes to war, you’ll be far safer here.”
“My safety!” she said. “What does that mean to me?”
“Think of what it means to me,” he said. He kissed her pale forehead, her cheekbones, her mouth. “I can’t let you come,” he said. “There’s no use discussing it. I can’t. And very soon I’ve got to go home and get my things together. My train leaves at half past seven tomorrow. So you’ve got to think now. You’ve got to sit down and think about what you’d like to send to Budapest. I can carry letters for you.”
“What small consolation!”
“Imagine what comfort a letter will be to your mother.” With trembling hands he touched her hair, her shoulders. “And I can speak to her, Klara. I can ask her if she’ll allow me to have you for my wife.”
She nodded and took his hand, but she was no longer looking at him; it seemed she’d retreated to some small and remote place of self-protection. As they went to the sitting room so she could write, he stood by the open window and watched the sapling chestnuts show the pale undersides of their leaves. The breeze outside smelled of thunderstorm. He knew he was acting for her safety, acting as a husband should. He knew he was doing what was right. Soon she would finish her letters, and then he would kiss her goodbye.
How could he have known it would be his last night as a resident of Paris? What might he have done, how might he have spent those hours, if he’d known? Would he have walked the streets all night to fix in his mind their unpredictable angles, their smells, their variances of light? Would he have gone to Rosen’s flat and shaken him from sleep, bid him luck with his political struggles and with Shalhevet? Would he have gone to see Ben Yakov at his bereft apartment one last time? Would he have gone to Polaner’s, crouched at his friend’s side and told him what was true: that he loved him as much as he had ever loved a friend, that he owed his life and happiness to him, that he had never felt such exhilaration as when they’d worked together in the studio at night, making something they believed to be daring and good? Would he have taken a last stroll by the Sarah-Bernhardt, that sleeping grande dame, its red velvet seats flocked with dust, its corridors empty and quiet, its dressing rooms still redolent of stage makeup? Would he have crept into Forestier’s studio to memorize his catalogue of disappearance and illusion? Would he have gone back through the secret door he knew about in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, back to his studio at school, to run his hands across the familiar smooth surface of his drawing table, the groove of the pencil rail, the mechanical pencils themselves, with their crosshatched finger rests, their hard smooth lead, the satisfying click that signified the end of one unit of work, the beginning of another? Would he have gone back to the rue de Sévigné, his heart’s first and last home in Paris, the place where he had first glimpsed Klara Morgenstern with a blue vase in her hands? The place where they had first made love, first argued, first spoken of their children?
But he didn’t know. He knew only that he was right to keep Klara from going with him. He would go, and then he would come back to her. No war could keep him from her, no law or regulation. He rolled himself into the blankets they’d shared and thought about her all night. Beside him, on the floor, Tibor slept on a borrowed mattress. There was an unspeakable comfort in the familiar rhythm of his breathing. They might almost have been back in the house in Konyár, both of them home from gimnázium on a weekend, their parents asleep on the other side of the wall, and Mátyás dreaming in his little cot.
All he had was his cardboard suitcase and his leather satchel. It wasn’t enough luggage to require a cab. Instead he and Tibor walked to the station, just as they had when Andras had left Budapest two years earlier. When they crossed the Pont au Change he considered turning once more toward Klara’s house, but there wasn’t time; the train would leave in an hour. He stopped only at a boulangerie to buy bread for the trip. In the windows of the tabac next door, the newspapers proclaimed that Count Csaky, the Hungarian foreign minister, had gone on a secret diplomatic mission to Rome; he’d been sent by the German government, and had gone directly from the airport to a meeting with Mussolini. The Hungarian government had refused to comment on the purpose of the visit, saying only that Hungary was happy to facilitate communication between its allies.
The station was crowded with August travelers, its floor a maze of rucksacks and trunks, boxes and valises. Soon Tibor would get on a train and go back to Italy with Ilana; in the ticket line Andras touched Tibor’s sleeve and said, “I wish I could be there to see you married.”
Tibor smiled and said, “Me too.”
“I couldn’t have guessed it would turn out this way for you.”
“I didn’t dare to hope it would,” Tibor said.
“Lucky bastard,” Andras said.
“Let’s hope it runs in the family,” Tibor said. His gaze had drifted toward the front of the line, where a slight, dark-haired woman had opened a wallet to count out notes. Andras felt a pang: She wore her hair the way Klara did, in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. Her summer coat was cut like Klara’s, her posture elegant and erect. How cruel of fate, he thought, to place a vision of her before him at that moment.
And then, as she turned to replace the wallet in her valise, it seemed his heart would stop: It was her. She met his eyes with her gray eyes and raised a hand to show him a ticket: She was going with him. Nothing he could say would keep her from it.