CLASSES BEGAN the first Monday of January with a two-day charrette. Within a span of forty-eight hours they had to design a freestanding living space of fifty meters square, with a movable wall, two windows, a bath, a galley kitchen. They would submit a front elevation of the building, a floor plan, and a model. Forty-eight hours, during which anyone who cared about the project wouldn’t eat a meal or sleep or leave the studio. Andras took the project like an oblivion drug, felt the crush of time in his veins, willed it to make him forget his ten days with Klara. He bent over the plane of his worktable and made it the landscape of his mind. The Gare d’Orsay critique had left its imprint; he vowed that he would not be humiliated before the rest of the class, before that smug Lemarque and the ranks of the upperclassmen. Toward the end of his thirtieth waking hour he looked at his design and found that what he’d drawn was his parents’ house in Konyár, with a few details changed. One bedroom, not two. An indoor bath instead of the tin tub and outhouse. A modern indoor kitchen. One external wall had become a movable wall; it could be opened in summer to let the house communicate with the garden. The façade was plain and white with a many-paned window. On his second sleepless night he drew the movable wall as a curve; when it was open it would make a shady niche. He drew a stone bench in the garden, a circular reflecting pool. His parents’ house made over into a country retreat. He feared it was absurd, that everyone would see it for what it was: a Hajdú boy’s design, rude and primitive. He turned it in at the last minute and received, to his surprise, an appreciative nod and a paragraph of closely written praise from Vago, and the grudging approval of even the harshest fifth-year students.
At the Bernhardt they struck the set of The Mother and held auditions for Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna. Though Zoltán Novak pleaded, Madame Gérard would not take a role in the new play; she’d already been offered the role of Lady Macbeth at the Thêátre des Ambassadeurs, and Novak couldn’t pay her what they would. Andras was grateful for her impending departure. He couldn’t look at her without thinking of Klara, without wondering whether Madame Gérard knew what had happened between them. The day before she departed for the Ambassadeurs he helped her box up her dressing room: her Chinese robe, her tea things, her makeup, a thousand fan letters and postcards and little presents. As they worked she told him about the members of the new company she would join, two of whom had been featured in American films, and one of whom had appeared with Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet. He found it difficult to pay attention. He wanted to tell her what had happened. He had told no one; even to have told his friends at school would have reduced it somehow, made it seem a superficial and fleeting liaison. But Madame Gérard knew Klara; she would know what it meant. She might even be able to offer some hope. So he closed the dressing-room door and confessed it all, omitting only the revelation about the letter.
Madame Gérard listened gravely. When he’d finished, she got to her feet and paced the green rug in front of the dressing-room mirror as if bringing a monologue to mind. At last she turned and put her hands on the backrest of her makeup chair. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew, and I ought to have said something. When I saw you at the Bois de Vincennes, I knew. You didn’t care at all for the girl. You looked only at Klara. I’ll admit,” and she turned her eyes from him, laughing ruefully to herself, “old as I am, I was a little jealous. But I never thought you’d act upon your feelings.”
Andras rubbed his palms against his thighs. “I shouldn’t have,” he said.
“It’s well she ended it,” Madame Gérard said. “She knew it wasn’t right. She invited you into her house thinking you might be a friend to her daughter. You should have stopped going once you knew you didn’t care for Elisabet.”
“It was too late by then,” he said. “I couldn’t stop.”
“You don’t know Klara,” Madame Gérard said. “You can’t, not after a few Sunday lunches and a week-long affair. She’s never made any man happy. She’s had ample chance to fall in love—and, if you’ll pardon me, with grown men, not first-year architecture students. Don’t imagine she hasn’t had plenty of suitors. If she ever does take a man seriously, it’ll be because she wants to get married—that is to say, because she wants someone to ease her life, to take care of her. Which you, my dear, are in no position to do.”
“You don’t have to remind me of that.”
“Well, someone must, apparently!”
“But what now?” he demanded. “I can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Why not? It’s over between the two of you. You said as much yourself.”
“It’s not over for me. I can’t put her out of my mind.”
“I’d advise you to try,” Madame Gérard said. “She can’t be any good to you.”
“That’s all, then? I’m supposed to forget her?”
“That would be best.”
“Impossible,” he said.
“Poor darling,” Madame Gérard said. “I’m sorry. But you’ll get over it. Young men do.” She turned again to her packing, loading her gold and silver makeup sticks into a box with dozens of little drawers. A private smile came to her mouth; she rolled a tube of rouge between her fingers and turned to him. “You’ve joined an illustrious club, you know, now that Klara’s thrown you over. Most men never make it that far.”
“Please,” he said. “I can’t bear to hear you speak of her that way.”
“It’s the girl’s father, you know. I think she must still be in love with him.”
“Elisabet’s father,” he said. “Is he here in Paris? Does she still see him?”
“Oh, no. He died many years ago, as I understand it. But death isn’t a bar to love, as you may learn someday.”
“Who was he?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. Klara keeps her history close.”
“So it’s hopeless, then. I’m supposed to let it go because she’s in love with a dead man.”
“Allow it to be what it was: a pretty episode. The satisfaction of a mutual curiosity.”
“That wasn’t what it was to me.”
She tilted her head at him and smiled again, that terrible all-knowing smile. “I’m afraid I’m the wrong person to dispense advice about love. Unless you’d like to be disabused of your romantic notions.”
“You’ll excuse me, then, if I leave you to your packing.”
“My dear boy, no excuse needed.” She rose, kissed him on both cheeks, and turned him out into the hall. There was no choice for him but to go back to his work; he did it in mute consternation, wishing he had never confided in her.
There was one great source of relief, one astonishing piece of news that had arrived in a telegram from Budapest: Tibor was coming to visit. His classes in Modena would start at the end of January, but before he went to Italy he would come to Paris for a week. When the telegram arrived, Andras had shouted the news aloud into the stairwell of the building, at a volume that had brought the concierge out into the hall to reprimand him for disturbing the other tenants. He silenced her by kissing her on the brow and showing her the telegram: Tibor was coming! Tibor, his older brother. The concierge voiced the hope that this older brother would beat some manners into Andras, and left him in the hall to experience his delight alone. Andras hadn’t mentioned Klara in his letters to Tibor, but he felt as if Tibor knew—as if Tibor had sensed that Andras was in distress and had decided to come for that reason.
The anticipation of the visit—three weeks away, then two, then one—got him from home to school, and from school to work. Now that The Mother was finished and Madame Gérard gone, afternoons at the Sarah-Bernhardt passed at a maddening crawl. He had arranged everything so well backstage that there was little to do while the actors rehearsed; he paced behind the curtain, subject to an increasing fear that Monsieur Novak would discover his superfluity. One afternoon, after he’d overseen the delivery of a load of lumber for the set of Fuente Ovejuna, he approached the head carpenter and offered his services as a set builder. The head carpenter put him to work. During the afternoon hours Andras banged flats together; after hours he studied the design of the new sets. This was a different kind of architecture, all about illusion and impression: perspective flattened to make spaces look deeper, hidden doors through which actors might materialize or disappear, pieces that could be turned backward or inside out to create new tableaux. He began to mull over the design in bed at night, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Klara. The false fronts that represented the Spanish town might be put on wheels and rotated, he thought; their opposite sides could be painted to represent the building interiors. He made a set of sketches showing how it might be done, and later he redrew the sketches as plans. His second week as assistant set builder he went to the head carpenter and showed him the work. The carpenter asked him if he thought he had a budget of a million francs. Andras told him it would cost less than building the two sets of flats that would be required to make separate exteriors and interiors. The head carpenter scratched his head and said he’d consult the set designer. The set designer, a tall round-shouldered man with an ill-trimmed moustache and a monocle, scrutinized the plans and asked Andras why he was still working as a gofer. Did he want a job that would pay three times what he was making now? The set designer had an independent shop on the rue des Lombards and generally employed an assistant, but his most recent one had just finished his coursework at the Beaux-Arts and had taken a position outside the capital.
Andras did want the job. But Zoltán Novak had saved his life; he couldn’t very well walk out on the Sarah-Bernhardt. He accepted the man’s business card and stared at it all that night, wondering what to do.
The next afternoon he went to Novak’s office to lay the situation before him. There was a long silence after he knocked, then the sound of male voices in argument; the door flew open to reveal a pair of men in pinstriped suits, briefcases in hand, their faces flushed as though Novak had been insulting them in the vilest terms. The men clapped hats onto their heads and walked out past Andras without a nod or glance. Inside the office Novak stood at his desk with his hands on the blotter, watching the men recede down the hallway. When they’d disappeared, he came out from behind the desk and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey from the decanter on the sideboard. He looked over his shoulder at Andras and pointed to a glass. Andras raised a hand and shook his head.
“Please,” Novak said. “I insist.” He poured whiskey and added water.
Andras had never seen Novak drinking before dusk. He accepted the tumbler and sat down in one of the ancient leather chairs.
“Egészségedre,” Novak said. He lifted his glass, drained it, set it down on the blotter. “Can you guess who that was, leaving?”
“No,” Andras said. “But they looked rather grim.”
“They’re our money men. The people who’ve always managed to persuade the city to let us keep our doors open.”
“And?”
Novak sat back in his chair and laced his hands into a mountain. “Fifty-seven people,” he said. “That’s how many I have to fire today, according to those men. Including myself, and you.”
“But that’s everyone,” Andras said.
“Precisely,” he said. “They’re closing us down. We’re finished until next season, at least. They can’t support us any longer, even though we’ve posted profits all fall. The Mother did better than any other show in Paris, you know. But it wasn’t enough. This place is a money-sink. Do you know what it costs to heat five stories of open space?”
Andras took a swallow of whiskey and felt the false warmth of it move through his chest. “What will you do?” he said.
“What will you do?” Novak said. “And what will the actors do? And Madame Courbet? And Claudel, and Pély, and all the others? It’s a disaster. We’re not the only ones, either. They’re closing four theaters.” He sat back in his chair and stroked his moustache with one finger, his eyes moving over the bookshelves. “The fact is, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Madame Novak is in a delicate condition, as they say. She’s been pining for her parents in Budapest. I’m sure she’ll take this as a sign that we should return home.”
“But you’d rather stay,” Andras said.
Novak released a sigh from the broad bellows of his chest. “I understand how Edith feels. This isn’t our home. We’ve scratched out our little corner here, but none of it belongs to us. We’re Hungarians, in the end, not French.”
“When I met you in Vienna, I thought no man could look more Parisian.”
“Now you see how green you were,” Novak said, and smiled sadly. “But what about you? I know you’ve got your school fees to pay.”
Andras told him about the offer of an assistantship with the set designer, Monsieur Forestier, and how he’d just been coming to ask Novak’s advice on the matter.
Novak brought his hands together, a single beat of applause. “It would have been a terrible shame to lose you,” he said. “But it’s an excellent chance, and well timed. You’ve got to do it, of course.”
“I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done,” Andras said.
“You’re a good young man. You’ve worked hard here. I’ve never regretted taking you on.” He drained the rest of his drink and pushed the empty glass across the desk. “Now, would you fill that again for me? I’ve got to go break the news to the others. You’ll come to work tomorrow, I hope. There’ll be a great deal to do, getting this place closed down. You’ll have to tell Forestier I can’t release you until the end of the month.”
“Tomorrow, as usual,” Andras said.
He went home that evening with a frightening sense of vacancy in his chest. No more Sarah-Bernhardt. No more Monsieur Novak. No more Claudel, or Pély; no more Marcelle Gérard. And no more Klara, no more Klara. The hard white shell of his life punctured and blown clean. He was light now, hollow, an empty egg. Hollow and light, he drifted home through the January wind. At 34 rue des Écoles he climbed the flights and flights of stairs—how many hundreds of them were there?—feeling he didn’t have the energy to look at his books that night, nor even to wash his face or change for bed. He wanted only to lie down in his trousers and shoes and overcoat, pull the eiderdown over his head, ride out the hours before dawn. But at the top of the stairs he saw a line of light coming from beneath his own door, and when he put a hand on the doorknob he found it unlocked. He pushed the door open and let it swing. A fire in the grate; bread and wine on the table; in the single chair with a book in her hands, Klara.
“Te,” he said. You.
“And you,” she said.
“How did you get in?”
“I told the concierge it was your birthday. I said I was planning a surprise.”
“And what did you tell your daughter?”
She looked down at the cover of her book. “I told her I was going to see a friend.”
“What a shame that wasn’t true.”
She got to her feet, crossed the room to him, put her hands on his arms. “Please, Andras,” she said. “Don’t speak to me that way.”
He moved away from her and took off his coat, his scarf. For what felt like a long time he couldn’t say anything more; he went to the fireplace and crossed his arms, looking down into a faltering pyramid of bright coals. “It was bad enough, not knowing whether or not I’d see you again,” he said. “I told myself we were finished, but I couldn’t convince myself it was true. Finally I confided in Marcelle. She was kind enough to tell me I wasn’t alone in my misery. She said I belonged to an illustrious club of men you’d thrown over.”
Her gray eyes darkened. “Thrown over? Is that what you feel I’ve done to you?”
“Thrown over, jettisoned, sent packing. I don’t suppose it matters what you call it.”
“We decided it was impossible.”
“You decided.”
She went to him and moved her hands over his arms, and when she looked up into his face he saw there were tears in her eyes. To his horror his own eyes began to burn. This was Klara, whose name he’d carried with him from Budapest; Klara, whose voice came to him in his sleep.
“What do you want?” he said into her hair. “What am I supposed to do?”
“I’ve been miserable,” she said. “I can’t let it go. I want to know you, Andras.”
“And I want to know you,” he said. “I don’t like secrecy.” But he knew as he said it that what was hidden made her all the more attractive; there was a kind of torment in her unknowability, in the rooms that lay beyond the ones in which she entertained him.
“You’ll have to be patient with me,” she said. “You’ll have to let me trust you.”
“I can be patient,” he said. He had drawn her so close that the sharp crests of her pelvis pressed against him; he wanted to reach into her body and grab her by the bones. “Claire Morgenstern,” he said. “Klárika.” She would ruin him, he thought. But he could no sooner have sent her away than he could have dismissed geometry from architecture, or the cold from January, or the winter sky from outside his window. He bent to her and kissed her. Then, for the first time, he took her into his own bed.
When he stepped into the world the next morning it was a transformed place. The dullness of the weeks without her had fallen away. He had become human again, had reclaimed his own flesh and blood, and hers. Everything glittered too brilliantly in the winter sun; every detail of the street rushed at him as if he were seeing it for the first time. How had he never noticed the way light fell from the sky onto the bare limbs of the lindens outside his building, the way it broke and diffused on the wet paving stones and needled whitely from the polished brass handles of the doors along the street? He savored the bracing slap of his soles against the sidewalk, fell in love with the cascade of ice in the frozen fountain of the Luxembourg. He wanted to thank someone aloud for the fine long corridor of the boulevard Raspail, which conducted him every day along its row of Haussmann-era buildings to the blue doors of the École Spéciale. He adored the empty courtyard awash with winter sunlight, its green benches empty, its grass frozen, its paths wet with melted snow. A speckle-breasted bird on a branch pronounced her name exactly: Klara, Klara.
He ran upstairs to the studio and looked among the drawings for the new set of plans he’d been working on with Polaner. He thought he might spend a few minutes on them before he had to report to Vago for his morning French. But the plans weren’t there; Polaner must have taken them home with him. Instead he picked up the textbook of architectural vocabulary he would study that morning with Vago, and ran downstairs again for a stop at the men’s room. He pushed open the door into echoing dark and fumbled for the light switch. From the far corner of the room came a low wheezing groan.
Andras turned on the light. On the concrete floor, against the wall beyond the urinals and the sinks, someone was curled into a tight G. A small form, a man’s, in a velvet jacket. Beside him a set of plans, crumpled and boot-stomped.
“Polaner?”
That sound again. A wheeze sliding into a groan. And then his own name.
Andras went to him and knelt beside him on the concrete. Polaner wouldn’t look at Andras, or couldn’t. His face was dark with bruises, his nose broken, his eyes hidden in purple folds. He kept his knees tight against his chest.
“My God,” Andras said. “What happened? Who did this?”
No response.
“Don’t move,” Andras said, and staggered to his feet. He turned and ran out of the room, across the courtyard, and up the stairs to Vago’s office, and opened the door without knocking.
“Lévi, what on earth?”
“Eli Polaner’s been beaten half to death. He’s in the men’s room, ground floor.”
They ran downstairs. Vago tried to get Polaner to let him see what had happened, but Polaner wouldn’t uncurl. Andras pleaded with him. When Polaner dropped his arms from his face, Vago took a sharp breath. Polaner started to cry. One of his lower teeth had been knocked out, and he spat blood onto the concrete.
“Stay here, both of you,” Vago said. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”
“No,” Polaner said. “No ambulance.” But Vago had already gone, the door slamming behind him as he ran into the courtyard.
Polaner rolled onto his back, letting his arms go limp. Beneath the velvet jacket his shirt had been torn open, and something had been written on his chest in black ink.
Feygele. A Jewish fag.
Andras touched the torn shirt, the word. Polaner flinched.
“Who did it?” Andras said.
“Lemarque,” Polaner said. Then he mumbled something else, a phrase Andras could only hear halfway, and couldn’t translate: “J’étais coin …”
“Tu étais quoi?”
“J’étais coincé,” Polaner said, and repeated it until Andras could understand. They’d caught him in a trap. Tricked him. In a whisper: “Asked me to meet him here last night. And then came with three others.”
“Meet him here at night?” Andras said. “To work on those plans?”
“No.” Polaner turned his blackened and swollen eyes on him. “Not to work.”
Feygele.
It took him a moment to understand. Meet at night: an assignation. So this, and not the girl back in Poland, the would-be fiancée who had written him those letters, was what had prevented him from showing interest in women here in Paris.
“Oh, God,” Andras said. “I’ll kill him. I’ll knock his teeth down his throat.”
Vago came through the door of the men’s room with a first-aid box. A cluster of students crowded into the doorway behind him. “Go away,” he shouted back over his shoulder, but the students didn’t move. Vago’s brows came together into a tight V. “Now!” he cried, and the students backed away, murmuring to each other. The door slammed. Vago knelt on the floor beside Andras and put a hand on Polaner’s shoulder.
“An ambulance is coming,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”
Polaner coughed, spat blood. He tried to hold his shirt closed with one hand, but the effort was beyond him; his arm fell against the concrete floor.
“Tell me what?” said Vago.
“Who did this.”
“Another student?” Vago said. “We’ll bring him before the disciplinary council. He’ll be expelled. We’ll press criminal charges.”
“No, no,” Polaner said. “If my parents knew—”
Now Vago saw the word inked across Polaner’s chest. He rocked back onto his heels and put a hand to his mouth. For a long time he didn’t speak or move. “All right,” he said, finally. “All right.” He moved the shreds of Polaner’s shirt aside to get a better look at his injuries; Polaner’s chest and abdomen were black with bruises. Andras could hardly bear to look. Nausea plowed through him, and he had to put his head against one of the porcelain sinks. Vago pulled off his own jacket and draped it over Polaner’s chest. “All right,” he said. “You’ll go to the hospital and they’ll take care of you. We’ll worry about the rest of this later.”
“Our plans,” Polaner said, touching the crumpled sheets of drafting paper.
“Don’t think about that,” Vago said. “We’ll fix them.” He picked up the plans and handed them carefully to Andras, as though there were any chance they could be salvaged. Then, hearing the ambulance bell outside, he ran to direct the attendants to the men’s room. Two men in white uniforms brought a stretcher in; when they lifted Polaner onto it, he fainted from the pain. Andras held the door open as they carried him into the courtyard. A crowd had gathered outside. The word had spread as the students arrived for morning classes. The attendants had to push their way through the crowd as they carried Polaner down the flagstone path.
“There’s nothing to see,” Vago shouted. “Go to your classes.” But there were no classes yet; it was only a quarter to eight. Not a single person turned away until the attendants had gotten Polaner into the ambulance. Andras stood at the courtyard door, holding Polaner’s plans like the broken body of an animal. Vago put a hand on his shoulder.
“Come to my office,” he said.
Andras turned to follow him. He knew this was the same courtyard he’d crossed earlier that morning, with the same frosted grass and green benches, the same paths bright-wet in the sun. He knew it, but now he couldn’t see what he had seen before. It astonished him to think the world could trade that beauty for this ugliness, all in the space of a quarter hour.
In his office, Vago told Andras about the other cases. Last February someone had stenciled the German words for filth and swine onto the final projects of a group of Jewish fifth-year students, and later that spring a student from Côte d’Ivoire had been dragged from the studio at night and beaten in the cemetery behind the school. That student, too, had had an insult painted on his chest, a racial slur. But not one of the perpetrators had been identified. If Andras had any information to volunteer, he would be helping everyone.
Andras hesitated. He sat on his usual stool, rubbing his father’s pocket watch with his thumb. “What will happen if they’re caught?”
“They’ll be questioned. We’ll take disciplinary and legal action.”
“And then their friends will do something worse. They’ll know Polaner told.”
“And if we do nothing?” Vago said.
Andras let the watch drop into the hollow of his pocket. He considered what his father would tell him to do in a situation like this. He considered what Tibor would tell him to do. There was no question: They would both think him a coward for hesitating.
“Polaner mentioned Lemarque,” he said. It came out as a whisper at first, and he repeated the name, louder. “Lemarque and some others. I don’t know who else.”
“Fernand Lemarque?”
“That’s what Polaner said.” And he told Vago everything he knew.
“All right,” said Vago. “I’m going to talk to Perret. In the meantime”—he opened his architectural vocabulary book to the page that depicted the inner structures of roofs, with their vertical poinçons, their buttressing contre-fiches, their riblike arbalétriers—“stay here and study,” he said, and left Andras alone in the office.
Andras couldn’t study, of course; he couldn’t keep the image of Polaner from his mind. Again and again he saw Polaner on the floor, the word inscribed on his chest in black ink, the plans crumpled beside him. Andras understood desperation and loneliness; he knew how it felt to be thousands of kilometers from home; he knew how it felt to carry a secret. But to what depths of misery would Polaner have had to descend in order to imagine Lemarque as a lover? As a person with whom he might share a moment of intimacy in the men’s room at night?
Not five minutes passed before Rosen burst into Vago’s office, cap in hand. Ben Yakov stood behind him, abashed, as though he’d tried and failed to prevent Rosen from tearing upstairs.
“Where’s that little bastard?” Rosen shouted. “Where is that weasel? If they’re hiding him up here, I swear to God I’ll kill them all!”
Vago ran down the hall from Perret’s office. “Lower your voice,” he said. “This isn’t a beer hall. Where’s who?”
“You know who,” Rosen said. “Fernand Lemarque. He’s the one who whispers sale Juif. The one who put up those posters for that Front de la Jeunesse. You saw them: Meet and Unite, Youth of France, and all that rubbish, at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes, of all places. They’re anti-parliament, anti-Semitic, anti-everything. He’s one of their little stooges. There’s a whole group of them. Third-years, fifth-years. From here, from the Beaux-Arts, from other schools all over the city. I know. I’ve been to their meetings. I’ve heard what they want to do to us.”
“All right,” Vago said. “Suppose you tell me about it after studio.”
“After studio!” Rosen spat on the floor. “Right now! I want the police.”
“We’ve already contacted the police.”
“Bullshit! You haven’t called anyone. You don’t want a scandal.”
Now Perret himself came down the hall, his gray cape rolling behind him. “Enough,” he said. “We’re handling this. Go to your studio.”
“I won’t,” Rosen said. “I’m going to find that little bastard myself.”
“Young man,” Perret said. “There are elements of this situation that you don’t understand. You’re not a cowboy. This is not the Wild West. This country has a system of justice, which we’ve already put into play. If you don’t lower your voice and conduct yourself like a gentleman, I’m going to have you removed from this school.”
Rosen turned and went down the stairs, cursing under his breath. Andras and Ben Yakov followed him to the studio, where Vago met them ten minutes later. At nine o’clock they continued with the previous day’s lesson, as if designing the perfect maison particulier were the only thing that mattered in the world.
At the hospital that afternoon, Andras and Rosen and Ben Yakov found Polaner in a long narrow ward filled with winter light. He lay in a high bed, his legs propped on pillows, his nose set with a plaster bridge, deep purple bruises ringing his eyes. Three broken ribs. A broken nose. Extensive contusions on the upper body and legs. Signs of internal bleeding—abdominal swelling, unstable pulse and temperature, blood pooling beneath the skin. Symptoms of shock. Aftereffects of hypothermia. That was what the doctor told them. A chart at the foot of Polaner’s bed showed temperature and pulse and blood-pressure readings taken every quarter hour. As they crowded around the bed, he opened his swollen eyes, called them by unfamiliar Polish names, and lost consciousness. A nurse came down the ward with two hot-water bottles, which she tucked beneath Polaner’s sheets. She took his pulse and blood pressure and temperature and recorded the numbers on his chart.
“How is he?” Rosen asked, getting to his feet.
“We don’t know yet,” the nurse said.
“Don’t know? Is this a hospital? Are you a nurse? Isn’t it your job to know?”
“All right, Rosen,” Ben Yakov said. “It’s not her fault.”
“I want to speak to that doctor again,” Rosen said.
“I’m afraid he’s making his rounds at the moment.”
“For God’s sake! This is our friend. I just want to know exactly how bad it is.”
“I wish I could tell you myself,” the nurse said.
Rosen sat down again and put his head in his hands. He waited until the nurse had gone off down the ward. “I swear to God,” he said. “I swear to God, if I catch those bastards! I don’t care what happens to me. I don’t care if I do get kicked out of school. I’ll go to jail if I have to. I want to make them regret they were born.” He looked up at Andras and Ben Yakov. “You’ll help me find them, won’t you?”
“Why?” Ben Yakov said. “So we can bash their skulls in?”
“Oh, pardon me,” Rosen said. “I suppose you wouldn’t want to risk having your own pretty nose broken.”
Ben Yakov got up from his chair and took Rosen by the shirtfront. “You think I like seeing him like this?” he said. “You think I don’t want to kill them myself?”
Rosen twisted his shirt out of Ben Yakov’s grasp. “This isn’t just about him. The people who did this to him would do it to us.” He took up his coat and slung it over his arm. “I don’t care if you come with me or not. I’m going to look for them, and when I find them they’re going to answer for what they did.” He jammed his cap onto his head and went off down the ward.
Ben Yakov put a hand to the back of his neck and stood looking at Polaner. Then he sighed and sat down again beside Andras. “Look at him. God, why did he have to meet Lemarque at night? What was he thinking? He can’t be—what they said.”
Andras watched Polaner’s chest rise and fall, a faint disturbance beneath the sheets. “And what if he were?” he said.
Ben Yakov shook his head. “Do you believe it?”
“It’s not impossible.”
Ben Yakov set his chin on his fist and stared at the railing of the bed. He had ceased for the moment to resemble Pierre Fresnay. His eyes were hooded and damp, his mouth drawn into a crumpled line. “There was one time,” he said, slowly. “One day when we were going to meet you and Rosen at the café, he said something about Lemarque. He said he thought Lemarque wasn’t really an anti-Semite—that he hated himself, not Jews. That he had to put on a show so people wouldn’t see him for what he was.”
“What did you say?”
“I said Lemarque could go stuff himself.”
“That’s what I would have said.”
“No,” Ben Yakov said. “You would have listened. You’d have had something intelligent to say in return. You would have asked what made him think so.”
“He’s a private person,” Andras said. “He might not have said more if you’d asked.”
“But I knew something was wrong. You must have noticed it too. You were working on that project with him. Anyone could tell he hadn’t been sleeping, and he was so quiet when Lemarque was around—quieter than usual.”
Andras didn’t know what to say. He’d been consumed with thoughts of Klara, with his anticipation of Tibor’s visit, with his own work. He was aware of Polaner as a constant presence in his life, knew him to be guarded and circumspect, even knew him to brood at times; but he hadn’t considered that Polaner might possess private woes as monumental as his own. If the affair with Klara had been difficult, how much harder might it have been for Polaner to nurse a secret attraction to Lemarque? He had spent little time imagining what it might be like to be a man who favored men. There were plenty of girlish men and boyish women in Paris, of course, and everyone knew the famous clubs and balls where they went to meet: Magic-City, the Monocle, the Bal de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève; but that world seemed remote from Andras’s life. What hint of it had there been in his own experience? Things had gone on at gimnázium—boys cultivated friendships that seemed romantic in their intrigues and betrayals; and then there were those times when he and his classmates would stand in a row, their shorts around their ankles, bringing themselves off together in the semidark. There was one boy at school whom everyone said loved boys—Willi Mandl, a lanky blond boy who played piano, wore white embroidered socks, and had been glimpsed one afternoon in a secondhand store dreamily fondling a blue silk reticule. But that was all part of the fog of childhood, nothing that seemed to bear upon his current life.
Now Polaner opened his eyes and looked at Andras. Andras touched Ben Yakov’s sleeve. “Polaner,” Andras said. “Can you hear me?”
“Are they here?” Polaner said, almost unintelligibly.
“We’re here,” Andras said. “Go to sleep. We’re not going to leave you.”