JÓZSEF HÁSZ’S BUILDING was of sharp-edged sandstone, six stories with tall casements and ornate cast-iron balconies. From the top floor came a blast of hot jazz, cornet and piano and saxophone dueling just beyond the blazing windows. Andras went to the door to ring the bell, but the door had been propped open; in the vestibule a cluster of girls in close-fitting silk dresses stood drinking champagne and smoking violet-scented cigarettes. They gave him hardly a glance as he dragged his luggage inside and pushed it against the wall. With his heart in his throat he stepped forward to touch one of the girls on the sleeve, and she turned a coy eye toward him and raised a painted brow.
“József Hász?” he said.
The girl raised one finger and pointed toward the very top of the oval staircase. “Là-bas,” she said. “En haut.”
He dragged his luggage and the massive box into the lift, and took it as high as it would go. At the top, he stepped out into a crush of men and women, of smoke and jazz; the entirety of the Latin Quarter, it seemed, had assembled at József Hász’s. Leaving his luggage in the hall, he stepped in through the open door of the apartment and repeated the question of Hász’s name to a series of drunken revelers. After a labyrinthine tour of high-ceilinged rooms he found himself standing on a balcony with Hász himself, a tall, loose-limbed young man in a velvet smoking jacket. Hász’s large gray eyes rested on Andras’s in an expression of champagne-tinged bemusement, and he asked a question in French and raised his glass.
Andras shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s got to be Hungarian for now,” he said.
József squinted at him. “And which Hungarian are you, exactly?”
“Andras Lévi. The Hungarian from your mother’s telegram.”
“What telegram?”
“Didn’t your mother send a telegram?”
“Oh, God, that’s right! Ingrid said there was a telegram.” József put a hand on Andras’s shoulder, then leaned in through the door of the balcony and shouted, “Ingrid!”
A blond girl in a spangled leotard pushed out onto the balcony and stood with one hand on her hip. A rapid French exchange ensued, after which Ingrid produced from her bosom a folded telegram envelope. József extracted the slip, read it, looked at Andras, read it again, and fell into a paroxysm of laughter.
“You poor man!” József said. “I was supposed to meet you at the station two hours ago!”
“Yes, that was the idea.”
“You must have wanted to kill me!”
“I might still,” Andras said. His head was throbbing in time with the music, his eyes watering, his insides twisting with hunger. It was clear to him he couldn’t stay at József Hász’s, but he could hardly imagine venturing out now to find another place to spend the night.
“Well, you’ve done well enough without me so far,” József said. “Here you are at my place, where there’s enough champagne to last us all night, and plenty of whatever else you like, if you take my meaning.”
“All I need is a quiet corner to sleep in. Give me a blanket and put me anywhere.”
“I’m afraid there’s no quiet corner here,” József said. “You’ll have to have a drink instead. Ingrid will get you one. Follow me.” He pulled Andras into the apartment and placed him under the care of Ingrid, who produced what must have been the last clean champagne flute in the building and poured Andras a tall sparkling glassful. The bottle sufficed for Ingrid herself; she toasted Andras, gave him a long smoky kiss, and pulled him into the front room, where the pianist was faking his way through “Downtown Uproar” and the partygoers had just started to dance.
In the morning he woke on a sofa beneath a window, his eyes draped in a silk chemise, his head a mass of cotton wool, his shirt unbuttoned, his jacket rolled beneath his head, his left arm stinging with pins and needles. Someone had put an eiderdown over him and opened the curtains; a block of sunlight fell across his chest. He stared up at the ceiling, where the floral froth of a plaster medallion curled around the fluted brass base of a light fixture. A knot of gold branches grew downward from the base, bearing small flame-shaped bulbs. Paris, he thought, and pushed himself up on his elbows. The room was littered with party detritus and smelled of spilled champagne and wilted roses. He had a vague recollection of a prolonged tête-à-tête with Ingrid, and then of a drinking contest with József and a broad-shouldered American; after that he could remember nothing at all. His luggage and the crate for József had been dragged inside and stacked beside the fireplace. Hász himself was nowhere to be seen. Andras rolled from the sofa and wandered down the hall to a white-tiled bathroom, where he shaved at the basin and bathed in a lion-footed tub that dispensed hot water directly from the tap. Afterward he dressed in his only clean shirt and trousers and jacket. As he was searching for his shoes in the main room, he heard a key in the lock. It was Hász, carrying a pastry-shop box and a newspaper. He tossed the box on a low table and said, “Up so soon?”
“What’s that?” Andras said, eyeing the ribbon-tied box.
“The cure for your hangover.”
Andras opened the box to find half a dozen warm pastries nestled in waxed paper. Until that moment he hadn’t allowed himself to realize how desperately hungry he was. He ate one chocolate croissant and was halfway through another before he thought to offer the box to his host, who refused, laughing.
“I’ve been up for hours,” József said. “I’ve already had my breakfast and read the news. Spain’s a wreck. France still won’t send troops. But there are two new beauty queens competing for the title of Miss Europe: the dark and lovely Mademoiselle de Los Reyes of Spain, and the mysterious Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia.” He tossed the newspaper to Andras. Two sleek ice-cold beauties in white evening gowns gazed from their photographs on the front page.
“I like de Los Reyes,” Andras said. “Those lips.”
“She looks like a Nationalist,” József said. “I like the other.” He loosened his orange silk scarf and sat back on the sofa, spreading his arms across its curving back. “Look at this place,” he said. “The maid doesn’t come until tomorrow morning. I’ll have to dine out today.”
“You ought to open that box. I’m sure your mother sent you something nice for dinner.”
“That box! I forgot all about it.” He brought it from across the room and pried open the top with a butter knife. Inside were a tin of almond cookies; a tin of rugelach; a tin into which an entire Linzer torte had been packed without a millimeter to spare; a supply of woolen underclothes for the coming winter; a box of stationery with the envelopes already addressed to his parents; a list of cousins upon whom he was supposed to call; a list of things he was supposed to procure for his mother, including certain intimate ladies’ garments; a new opera glass; and a pair of shoes made for him by his shoemaker on Váci utca, whose talents, he said, were unparalleled by those of any cobbler in Paris.
“My brother works at a shoe store on Váci utca,” Andras said, and mentioned the name of the shop.
“Not the same one, I’m afraid,” József said, a hint of condescension in his tone. He cut a slice of the Linzer torte, ate it, and pronounced it perfect. “You’re a good man, Lévi, dragging this cake across Europe. How can I repay the favor?”
“You might tell me how to set up a life here,” Andras said.
“Are you sure you want to take instruction from me?” József said. “I’m a wastrel and a libertine.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got no choice,” Andras said. “You’re the only person I know in Paris.”
“Ah! Lucky you, then,” József said. As they ate slices of Linzer torte from the tin, he recommended a Jewish boardinghouse and an art-supply store and a student dining club where Andras might get cheap meals. He didn’t dine there himself, of course—generally he had his meals sent up from a restaurant on the boulevard Saint-Germain—but he had friends who did, and found it tolerable. As for the fact that Andras was enrolled at the École Spéciale and not the Beaux-Arts, it was regrettable that they wouldn’t be schoolmates but probably just as well for Andras; József was a notoriously bad influence. And now that they had solved the problem of setting up Andras’s life in Paris, didn’t he want to come out to the balcony to have a smoke and look at his new city?
Andras allowed József to lead him through the bedroom and through the high French doors. The day was cold, and the previous night’s fog had settled into a fine drizzle; the sun was a silver coin behind a scrim of cloud.
“Here you are,” József said. “The most beautiful city on earth. That dome is the Panthéon, and over there is the Sorbonne. To the left is St.-Etienne-du-Mont, and if you lean this way you can see a sliver of Notre-Dame.”
Andras rested his hands on the railing and looked out over an expanse of unfamiliar gray buildings beneath a cold curtain of mist. Chimneys crowded the rooftops like strange alien birds, and the green haze of a park hovered beyond a battalion of zinc mansards. Far off to the west, blurred by distance, the Tour Eiffel melted upward into the sky. Between himself and that landmark lay thousands of unknown streets and shops and human beings, filling a distance so vast as to make the tower look wiry and fragile against the slate-gray clouds.
“Well?” József said.
“There’s a lot of it, isn’t there?”
“Enough to keep a man busy. In fact, I’ve got to be off again in a few minutes. I’ve got a lunch appointment with a certain Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia.” He winked and straightened his tie.
“Ah. You mean the girl in sequins from last night?”
“I’m afraid not,” József said, a slow smile coming to his face. “That’s another mademoiselle altogether.”
“Maybe you can spare one for me.”
“Not a chance, old boy,” József said. “I’m afraid I need them all to myself.” And he slipped through the balcony door and returned to the large front room, where he wrapped the orange silk scarf around his neck again and put on a loose jacket of smoke-colored wool. He caught up Andras’s satchel and Andras took the suitcase, and they brought everything down in the lift.
“I wish I could see you to that boardinghouse, but I’m late to meet my friend,” József said once they’d gotten everything out to the curb. “Here’s the cab fare, though. No, I insist! And come around for a drink sometime, won’t you? Let me know how you’re getting on.” He clapped Andras on the shoulder, shook his hand, and went off in the direction of the Panthéon, whistling.
Madame V, the proprietress of the boardinghouse, had a few useless words of Hungarian and plenty of unintelligible Yiddish, but no permanent place for Andras; she managed to communicate that he could spend the night on the couch in the upstairs hallway if he liked, but that he’d better go out at once to look for other lodgings. Still in a haze from the night at József’s, he ventured out into the Quartier Latin amid the artfully disheveled students with their canvas schoolbags, their portfolios, their bicycles, their stacks of political pamphlets and string-tied bakery boxes and market baskets and bouquets of flowers. Among them he felt overdressed and provincial, though his clothes were the same ones in which he had felt elegant and urban a week earlier in Budapest. On a cold bench in a dismal little plaza he combed his phrase book for the words for price, for student, for room, for how much. But it was one thing to understand that chambre à louer meant room for rent, and quite another to ring a doorbell and inquire in French about the chambre. He wandered from Saint-Michel to Saint-Germain, from the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine to the rue Clovis, re-cursing his inattentiveness in French class and making tiny notes in a tiny notebook about the locations of various chambres à louer. Before he could muster the courage to ring a single bell, he found himself utterly exhausted; sometime after dark he retreated to the boardinghouse in defeat.
That night, as he tried to find a comfortable position on the green sofa in the hallway, young men from all across Europe argued and fought and smoked and laughed and drank until long past midnight. None of the men spoke Hungarian, and none seemed to notice that there was a new man in their midst. Under different circumstances Andras might have gotten up to join them, but now he was so tired he could scarcely turn over beneath the blanket. The sofa, a spindly, ill-padded thing with wooden arms, seemed to have been designed as an instrument of torture. Once the men had gone to bed at last, rats emerged from the wainscoting to conduct their predawn scavengery; they ran the length of the hallway and stole the bread Andras had saved from dinner. The smells of decaying shoes and unwashed men and cooking grease followed him into his dreams. When he woke, sore and exhausted, he decided that one night had been enough. He would go out into the quartier that morning and inquire at the first place that advertised a room for rent.
On the rue des Écoles, near a tiny paved square with a spreading chestnut tree, he found a building with that now-familiar sign in the window: chambre à louer. He knocked on the red-painted door and crossed his arms, trying to ignore the rush of anxiety in his chest. The door swung open to reveal a short, square, heavy-browed woman, her mouth bent sideways into a scowl; on the bridge of her nose rested a pair of thick black-rimmed spectacles that made her eyes look tiny and faraway, as though they belonged to another, smaller person. Her wiry gray hair was flattened on one side, as if she had just been sleeping in a wing chair with her head on the wing. She put a fist on her hip and stared at Andras. Summoning all his courage, Andras forcefully mispronounced his need and pointed to the sign in the window.
The concierge understood. She beckoned him into a narrow tiled hall and led him up a spiral staircase with a skylight at the top. When they could go no higher, she took him down the hall to a long narrow garret with an iron bed against one wall, a crockery basin on a wooden stand, a farm table, a green wooden chair. Two dormer windows looked out onto the rue des Écoles; one of them was open, and on the windowsill sat an abandoned nest and the remnants of three blue eggs. In the fireplace there was a rusted grate, a broken toasting fork, an ancient crust of bread. The concierge shrugged and named a price. Andras searched his mind for the names of numbers, then cut the price in half. The concierge spat on the floor, stomped her feet, railed at Andras in French, and finally accepted his offer.
So it began: his life in Paris. He had an address, a brass key, a view. His view, like József’s, included the Panthéon and the pale limestone clock tower of St.-Étienne-du-Mont. Across the street was the Collège de France, and soon enough he would learn to use it as a marker for his building: 34 rue des Écoles, en face du Collège de France. Down the block was the Sorbonne. And farther away, down the boulevard Raspail, was the École Spéciale d’Architecture, where classes would begin on Monday. Once he had cleaned the room from top to bottom and unpacked his clothes into an apple crate, he counted his money and made a shopping list. He went down to the shops and bought a glass jar full of red currant jam, a box of cheap tea, a box of sugar, a mesh strainer, a bag of walnuts, a small brown crock of butter, a long baguette, and, as a single extravagance, a tiny nugget of cheese.
What a pleasure it was to fit his key to the lock, to open the door to his private room. He unloaded his groceries onto the windowsill and laid out his drawing supplies on the table. Then he sat down, sharpened a pencil with his knife, and sketched his view of the Panthéon onto a blank postal card. On its reverse he wrote his first message from Paris: Dear Tibor, I am here! I have a desperate garret; it’s everything I hoped for. On Monday I start school. Hurrah! Liberté, egalité, fraternité! With love, Andras. All he lacked was a stamp. He thought he might borrow one from the concierge; he knew there was a postbox around the corner. As he tried to picture exactly where it was, what came to mind instead was the recollection of an envelope, a wax seal, a monogram. He had forgotten the promise he’d made to the elder Mrs. Hász. Her missive to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné still waited in his suitcase. He dragged the case out from beneath the bed, half fearing that the letter would be gone, but it was there in the pocket where he’d put it, the wax seal intact. He ran downstairs to the concierge’s apartment and, with the help of his phrase book and a series of urgent gestures, begged a pair of stamps. After a search, he located the boîte aux lettres and slipped Tibor’s card inside. Then, imagining the pleasure of some silver-haired gentleman when the next day’s mail arrived, he dropped Mrs. Hász’s letter into the anonymous dark of the box.