HE TOLD TIBOR about the letter, of course; he couldn’t have kept a secret like that from his brother. In their shared bedroom, Tibor took the envelope and held it up to the light. It was sealed with a clot of red wax into which the elder Mrs. Hász had pressed her monogram.
“What do you make of it?” Andras said.
“Operatic intrigues,” Tibor said, and smiled. “An old lady’s fancy, coupled with paranoia about the unreliability of the post. A former paramour, this Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. That’s what I’d bet.” He returned the letter to Andras. “Now you’re a player in their romance.”
Andras tucked the letter into a pocket of his suitcase and told himself not to forget it. Then he checked his list for the fiftieth time, and found that there was nothing left to do now but to leave for Paris. To save the taxi fare, he and Tibor borrowed a wheelbarrow from the grocer next door and wheeled Andras’s suitcase and József’s enormous box all the way to Nyugati Station. At the ticket window there was a disagreement over Andras’s passport, which apparently looked too new to be authentic; an emigration officer had to be consulted, and then a more exalted officer, and finally an über-officer in a coat peppered with gold buttons, who made a tiny mark on the edge of the passport and reprimanded the other officers for calling him away from his duties. Minutes after the matter had been settled, Andras, fumbling with his leather satchel, dropped his passport into the narrow gap between the platform and the train. A sympathetic gentleman offered his umbrella; Tibor inserted the umbrella between platform and train and slid the passport to a place where he could retrieve it.
“I’d say it looks authentic now,” Tibor said, handing it over. The passport was smudged with dirt and torn at one corner where Tibor had stabbed it with the umbrella. Andras replaced it in his pocket and they walked down the platform to the door of his third-class carriage, where a conductor in a red-and-gold cap ushered passengers aboard.
“Well,” Tibor said. “I suppose you’d better find your seat.” His eyes were damp behind his glasses, and he put a hand on Andras’s arm. “Hold on to that passport from now on.”
“I will,” Andras said, not making a move to board the train. The great city of Paris awaited; suddenly he felt lightheaded with dread.
“All aboard,” the conductor said, and gave Andras a significant look.
Tibor kissed Andras on both cheeks and drew him close for a long moment. When they were boys going off to school, their father had always put his hands on their heads and said the prayer for travel before he let them on the train; now Tibor whispered the words under his breath. May God direct your steps toward tranquility and keep you from the hands of every foe. May you be safe from all misfortune on this earth. May God grant you mercy in his eyes and in the eyes of all who see you. He kissed Andras again. “You’ll come back a worldly man,” he said. “An architect. You’ll build me a house. I’m counting on it, do you hear?”
Andras couldn’t speak. He let out a long breath and looked down at the smooth concrete of the platform, where travel stickers had adhered in multinational profusion. Germany. Italy. France. The tie to his brother felt visceral, vascular, as though they were linked at the chest; the idea of boarding a train to be taken away from him seemed as wrong as ceasing to breathe. The train whistle blew.
Tibor removed his glasses and pressed the corners of his eyes. “Enough of this,” he said. “I’ll see you before long. Now go.”
Sometime after dark, Andras found himself looking out the window at a little town where the street signs and shop signs were all in German. The train must have slipped over the border without his knowing it; while he had been asleep with a book of Petőfi poems on his lap, they had left the landlocked ovulet of Hungary and entered the larger world. He cupped his hands against the glass and looked for Austrians in the narrow lanes, but could see none; gradually the houses became smaller and farther apart, and the town dwindled into countryside. Austrian barns, shadowy in moonlight. Austrian cows. An Austrian wagon, piled with silver hay. In the far distance, against a night-blue sky, the deeper blue of mountains. He opened the window a few inches; the air outside was crisp and smelled of woodsmoke.
He had the strange sensation of not knowing who he was, of having traveled off the map of his own existence. It was the opposite of the feeling he had every time he traveled east between Budapest and Konyár to see his parents; on those trips to his own birthplace there was a sense of moving deeper into himself, toward some essential core, as if toward the rice-sized miniature at the center of the Russian nesting doll his mother kept on the windowsill in her kitchen. But who might he imagine himself to be now, this Andras Lévi on a train passing westward through Austria? Before he’d left Budapest, he had scarcely considered how ill-equipped he was for an adventure like this one, a five-year course of study at an architectural college in Paris. Vienna or Prague he might have managed; he had always gotten high marks in German, which he’d studied since the age of twelve. But it was Paris and the École Spéciale that wanted him, and now he would have to get by on his two years of half-forgotten French. He knew little more than a smattering of food names, body parts, and laudatory adjectives. Like the other boys at his school in Debrecen, he had memorized the French words for the sexual positions that appeared on a set of old photographs passed along from one generation of students to another: croupade, les ciseaux, à la grecque. The cards were so old, and had been handled so thoroughly, that the images of intertwined couples were visible only as silver ghosts, and only when the cards were held at a particular angle to the light. Beyond that, what did he know of French—or, for that matter, of France? He knew that the country bordered the Mediterranean on one side and the Atlantic on another. He knew a little about the troop movements and battles of the Great War. He knew, of course, about the great cathedrals at Reims and at Chartres; he knew about Notre-Dame, about Sacré-Coeur, about the Louvre. And that was all, give or take a fragmentary fact. In the few weeks he’d had to prepare for the trip, he’d tortured the pages of his antiquated phrase book, bought cheap at a used bookstore on Szent István körút. The book must have predated the Great War; it offered translations for phrases like Where might I hire a team of horses? and I am Hungarian but my friend is Prussian.
Last weekend when he’d gone home to Konyár to say goodbye to his parents, he’d found himself confessing his fears to his father as they walked through the orchard after dinner. He hadn’t meant to say anything; between the boys and their father was the tacit understanding that as Hungarian men, they were not to show any sign of weakness, even at times of crisis. But as they passed between the apple rows, kicking through the knee-high stems of wild grass, Andras felt compelled to speak. Why, he wondered aloud, had he been singled out for recognition among all the artists in the show in Paris? How had the École Spéciale admissions board determined that he, in particular, deserved their favor? Even if his pieces had shown some special merit, who was to say he could ever produce work like that again, or, more to the point, that he’d succeed at the study of architecture, a discipline vastly different from any he’d undertaken before? At best, he told his father, he was the beneficiary of misplaced faith; at worst, a simple fraud.
His father threw his head back and laughed. “A fraud?” he said. “You, who used to read aloud to me from Miklós Ybl when you were eight years old?”
“It’s one thing to love an art and another to be good at it.”
“There was a time when men studied architecture just because it was a noble pursuit,” his father said.
“There are nobler pursuits. The medical arts, for example.”
“That’s your brother’s talent. You’ve got your own. And now you’ve got time and money to court it.”
“And what if I fail?”
“Ah! Then you’ll have a story to tell.”
Andras picked up a fallen branch from the ground and switched at the long grass. “It seems selfish,” he said. “Going off to school in Paris, and at someone else’s expense.”
“You’d be going at my expense if I could afford it, believe me. I won’t have you think of it as selfish.”
“What if you get pneumonia again this year? The lumberyard can’t run itself.”
“Why not? I’ve got the foreman and five good sawyers. And Mátyás isn’t far away if I need more help.”
“Mátyás, that little crow?” Andras shook his head. “Even if you could catch him, you’d be lucky to get any work out of him.”
“Oh, I could get work out of him,” his father said. “Though I hope I won’t have to. That scapegrace will have trouble enough graduating, with all the foolery he’s gotten into this past year. Did you know he’s joined some sort of dance troupe? He’s performing nights at a club and missing his morning classes.”
“I’ve heard all about it. All the more reason I shouldn’t be going off to school so far away. Once he moves to Budapest, someone’s got to look after him.”
“It’s not your fault you can’t go to school in Budapest,” his father said. “You’re at the mercy of your circumstances. I know something of that. But you do what you can with what you’ve got.”
Andras understood what he meant. His father had gone to the Jewish theological seminary in Prague, and might have become a rabbi if it hadn’t been for his own father’s early death; a series of tragedies had attended him through his twenties, enough to have made a weaker man surrender to despair. Since then he’d experienced a reversal of fortune so profound that everyone in the village believed he must have been particularly pitied and favored by the Almighty. But Andras knew that everything good that had come to him was the result of his own sheer stubbornness and hard work.
“It’s a blessing you’re going to Paris,” his father said. “Better to get out of this country where Jewish men have to feel second-class. I can promise you that’s not going to improve while you’re gone, though let’s hope it won’t get worse.”
Now, as Andras rode westward in the darkened railway carriage, he heard those words in his mind again; he understood that there had been another fear beneath the ones he’d spoken aloud. He found himself thinking of a newspaper story he’d read recently about a horrible thing that had happened a few weeks earlier in the Polish town of Sandomierz: In the middle of the night the windows of shops in the Jewish Quarter had been broken, and small paper-wrapped projectiles had been thrown inside. When the shop owners unwrapped the projectiles, they saw that they were the sawn-off hooves of goats. Jews’ Feet, the paper wrappings read.
Nothing like that had ever happened in Konyár; Jews and non-Jews had lived there in relative peace for centuries. But the seeds were there, Andras knew. At his primary school in Konyár, his schoolmates had called him Zsidócska, little Jew; when they’d all gone swimming, his circumcision had been a mark of shame. One time they held him down and tried to force a sliver of pork sausage between his clenched teeth. Those boys’ older brothers had tormented Tibor, and a younger set had been waiting for Mátyás when he got to school. How would those Konyár boys, now grown into men, read the news from Poland? What seemed an atrocity to him might seem to them like justice, or permission. He put his head against the cool glass of the window and stared into the unfamiliar landscape, surprised only by how much it looked like the flatland country where he had been born.
In Vienna the train stopped at a station far grander than any Andras had ever seen. The façade, ten stories high, was composed of glass panes supported by a gridwork of gilded iron; the supports were curlicued and flowered and cherubed in a design that seemed better suited to a boudoir than a train station. Andras got off the train and followed the scent of bread to a cart where a woman in a white cap was selling salt-studded pretzels. But the woman wouldn’t take his pengő or his francs. In her insistent German she tried to explain what Andras must do, pointing him toward the money-changing booth. The line at the booth snaked around a corner. Andras looked at the station clock and then at the stack of pretzels. It had been eight hours since he’d eaten the delicate sandwiches at the house on Benczúr utca.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to find the gentleman from Nyvgafi Station, the one who had let Tibor use his umbrella to retrieve Andras’s passport. The man was dressed in a gray traveling suit and a light overcoat; the dull gold of a watch chain shone against his vest. He was barrel-chested and tall, his dark hair brushed back in waves from a high domed forehead. He carried a glossy briefcase and a copy of La Revue du Cinema.
“Let me buy you a pretzel,” he said. “I’ve got some schillings.”
“You’ve been too kind already,” Andras said.
But the man stepped forward and bought two pretzels, and they went to a nearby bench to eat. The gentleman pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from a pocket and spread it over his trouser legs.
“I like a fresh-made pretzel better than anything they serve in the dining car,” the man said. “Besides, the first-class passengers tend to be first-class bores.”
Andras nodded, eating in silence. The pretzel was still hot, the salt electric on his tongue.
“I gather you’re going on past Vienna,” the man said.
“Paris,” Andras ventured. “I’m going there to study.”
The man turned his deep-lined eyes on Andras and scrutinized him for a long moment. “A future scientist? A man of law?”
“Architecture,” Andras said.
“Very good. A practical art.”
“And yourself?” Andras asked. “What’s your destination?”
“The same as yours,” the man said. “I run a theater in Paris, the Sarah-Bernhardt. Though it might be more correct to say the Sarah-Bernhardt runs me. Like a demanding mistress, I’m afraid. Theater: Now, there’s an impractical art.”
“Must art be practical?”
The man laughed. “No, indeed.” And then: “Do you go to the theater?”
“Not often enough.”
“You’ll have to come to the Sarah-Bernhardt, then. Present my card at the box office and tell them I sent you. Say you’re a compatriote of mine.” He extracted a card from a gold case and handed it to Andras. NOVAK Zoltán, metteur en scène, Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt.
Andras had heard of Sarah Bernhardt but knew little about her. “Did Madame Bernhardt perform there?” he asked. “Or”—more hesitantly—“does she still?”
The man folded the paper wrapper of his pretzel. “She did,” he said. “For many years. Back then it was called Théâtre de la Ville. But that was before my time. Madame Bernhardt is long dead, I’m afraid.”
“I’m an ignoramus,” Andras said.
“Not at all. You remind me of myself as a young man, off to Paris for the first time. You’ll be fine. You come from a fine family. I saw the way your brother looked out for you. Keep my card, in any case. Zoltán Novak.”
“Andras Lévi.” They shook hands, then returned to their railway cars—Novak to the first-class wagon-lit, Andras to the lesser comforts of third class.
It took him another two days to get to Paris, two days during which he had to travel through Germany, into the source of the growing dread that radiated across Europe. In Stuttgart there was a delay, a mechanical problem that had to be fixed before the train could go on. Andras was dizzy with hunger. He had no choice but to exchange a few francs for reichsmarks and find something to eat. At the exchange counter, a gap-toothed matron in a gray tunic made him sign a document affirming that he would spend all the exchanged money within the borders of Germany. He tried to enter a café near the station to buy a sandwich, but on the door there was a small sign, hand-lettered in Gothic characters, that read Jews Not Wanted. He looked through the glass door at a young girl reading a comic book behind the pastry counter. She must have been fifteen or sixteen, a white kerchief on her head, a thin gold chain at her throat. She raised her eyes and smiled at Andras. He took a step back and glanced down at the reichsmark coins in his hand—on one side an eagle with a wreathed swastika in its claws, on the other the mustachioed profile of Paul von Hindenburg—then back over his shoulder at the girl in the shop. The reichsmarks were nothing more than a few drops of blood in the country’s vast economic circulatory system, but suddenly he felt desperate to be rid of them; he didn’t want to eat the food they could buy him, even if he found a shop where Juden were not unerwünscht. Quickly, making sure no one saw what he was doing, he knelt and dropped the coins into the echoing mouth of a storm drain. Then he returned to the train without having eaten anything, and rode hungry through the final hundred kilometers of Germany. From the platform of every small-town German station, Nazi flags fluttered in the slipstream of the train. The red flag spilled from the topmost story of buildings, decorated the awnings of houses, appeared in miniature in the hands of a group of children marching in the courtyard of a school beside the tracks. By the time they crossed the border into France, Andras felt as though he’d been holding his breath for hours.
They passed through the rolling countryside and the little half-timbered villages and the interminable flat suburbs and finally the outer arrondissements of Paris itself. It was eleven o’clock at night before they reached the station. Struggling with his leather satchel, his overcoat, his portfolio, Andras made his way down the aisle of the train and out onto the platform. On the wall opposite, a mural fifty feet high showed serious young soldiers, their eyes hooded with determination, leaving to fight the Great War. On another wall hung a series of cloth banners that depicted a more recent battle—a Spanish one, Andras guessed from the soldiers’ uniforms. The overhead loudspeakers crackled with French; among the travelers on the platform, the low buzz of French and the lilt of Italian crossed the harsher cadences of German and Polish and Czech. Andras scanned the crowd for a young man in an expensive overcoat who seemed to be looking for someone. He hadn’t asked for a description or a photograph of József. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might have trouble finding each other. But an increasing number of passengers filled the platform, and Parisians ran to greet them, and József failed to appear. Amid the crush Andras caught a glimpse of Zoltán Novak; a woman in a smart hat and a fur-collared coat threw her arms around him. Novak kissed the woman and led her away from the train, and porters followed with his luggage.
Andras retrieved his own suitcase and the enormous box for József. He stood and waited as the crowd became even more dense and then began to dissipate. Still no brisk-looking young man stepped forward to conduct him into a life in Paris. He sat down on the wooden crate, suddenly lightheaded. He needed a place to sleep. He needed to eat. In a few days’ time he was supposed to appear at the École Spéciale, ready to begin his studies. He looked toward the row of doors marked SORTIE, at the lights of cars passing on the street outside. A quarter of an hour rolled by, and then another, without any sign of József Hász.
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the heavy card on which the elder Mrs. Hász had written her grandson’s address. This was all the direction he had. For six francs Andras recruited a walrus-faced porter to help him load his luggage and József’s enormous box into a taxi. He gave the driver József’s address and they rushed off in the direction of the Quartier Latin. As they sped along, the taxi driver kept up a steady stream of jocose French, of which Andras understood not a word.
He was hardly aware of what they passed on the way to József Hász’s. Fog tumbled in billows through the light of the streetlamps, and wet leaves blew against the windows of the cab. The gold-lit buildings spun by in a rush; the streets were full of Saturday night revelers, men and women with their arms slung loosely around each other. The cab sped over a river that must have been the Seine, and for an instant Andras allowed himself to imagine that they were passing over the Danube, that he was back in Budapest, and that in a short time he’d find himself home at the apartment on Hársfa utca, where he could climb the stairs and crawl into bed with Tibor. But then the taxi stopped in front of a gray stone building and the driver climbed out to unload Andras’s luggage. Andras fumbled in his pocket for more money. The driver tipped his hat, took the francs Andras offered, and said something that sounded like the Hungarian word bocsánat, I’m sorry, but which Andras later understood to be bon chance. Then the cab pulled away, leaving Andras alone on a sidewalk of the Quartier Latin.