ANDRAS HADN’T BEEN back to the Gare du Nord since he’d arrived from Budapest in September. Now, in late January, as he stood on the platform waiting for Tibor’s train, it amazed him to consider the bulk of ignorance he’d hauled to Paris those few months ago. He’d known almost nothing about architecture. Nothing about the city. Less than nothing about love. He had never touched a woman’s naked body. Hadn’t known French. Those SORTIE signs above the exits might as well have said YOU IDIOT! The past days’ events had only served to remind him how little he still knew of the world. He felt he was just beginning to sense the scope of his own inexperience, his own benightedness; he had scarcely begun to allay it. He’d hoped that by the time he saw his brother again he might feel more like a man, like someone conversant with the wider world. But there was nothing more he could do about that now. Tibor would have to take him as he was.
At a quarter past five the Western Europe Express pulled into the station, filling that glass-and-iron cavern with the screech of brakes. Porters lowered the steps and climbed down; passengers poured forth, men and women haggard from traveling all night. Young men his age, sleepless and uncertain-looking in the wintry light of the station, squinted at the signs and searched for their baggage. Andras scanned the faces of the passengers. As more and more of them passed without a sign of Tibor, he had a moment of fear that his brother had decided not to come after all. And then someone put a hand on his shoulder, and he turned, and there was Tibor Lévi on the platform of the Gare du Nord.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Tibor said, and pulled Andras close.
A carbonated joy rose up in Andras’s chest, a dreamlike sense of relief. He held his brother at arm’s length. Tibor scrutinized Andras from head to toe, his gaze coming to rest on Andras’s hole-ridden shoes.
“It’s a good thing you have a brother who’s a shoe clerk,” he said. “Or was one. Those filthy oxfords wouldn’t have lasted you another week.”
They retrieved Tibor’s bags and took a cab to the Latin Quarter, a trip Andras found surprisingly brief and direct, and he grasped how profoundly his first Parisian cab driver had cheated him. The streets flashed past almost too quickly; he wanted to show Tibor everything at once. They flew down the boulevard de Sébastopol and over the Île de la Cité, and were turning onto the rue des Écoles in what felt like an instant. The Latin Quarter crouched beneath a haze of rain, its sidewalks crowded with umbrellas. They rushed Tibor’s bags through the drizzle and dragged them upstairs. When they reached Andras’s garret, Tibor stood in the doorway and laughed.
“What?” Andras said. He was proud of his shabby room.
“It’s exactly as I imagined,” Tibor said. “Down to the last detail.”
Under his gaze the Paris apartment seemed to come fully into Andras’s possession perhaps for the first time, as if his seeing it made it continuous with the places Andras had lived before, with the life he had led before he climbed onto a train at Nyugati Station in September. “Come in,” Andras said. “Take off your coat. Let me make a fire.”
Tibor took off his coat, but he wouldn’t let Andras make the fire. It couldn’t have mattered less that this was Andras’s apartment, nor that Tibor had been traveling for three days. This was how it had always been between them: The older took care of the younger. If this had been Mátyás’s apartment and Andras had been there to visit, Andras would have been the one cracking the kindling and piling the paper beneath the logs. In a few minutes Tibor had conjured a steady blaze. Only then would he take off his shoes and crawl into Andras’s bed.
“What a relief!” he said. “It’s been three days since I slept lying down.” He pulled the coverlet over himself and in another moment he was asleep.
Andras set up his books on the table and tried to study, but found he couldn’t concentrate. He wanted news of Mátyás and his parents. And he wanted news of Budapest—not of its politics or its problems, which anyone could read about in the Hungarian dailies, but of the neighborhood where they’d lived, the people they knew, the innumerable small changes that marked the flow of time. He wanted, too, to tell Tibor what had happened to Polaner, whom he’d seen again that morning. Polaner had looked even worse than before, swollen and livid and feverish. His breath had grated in his throat, and the nurses had bent over him with dressings for his bruises and doses of fluids to raise his blood pressure. A team of doctors gathered at the foot of his bed and debated the risks and benefits of surgery. The signs of internal bleeding persisted, but the doctors couldn’t agree whether it was best to operate or whether the bleeding would stop on its own. Andras tried to decode their quick medical patter, tried to piece through the puzzle of French anatomical terms, but he couldn’t grasp everything, and his fear prevented him from asking questions. It was horrible to think of Polaner cut open, and even worse to think of the bleeding unstinted inside him. Andras had stayed until Professor Vago arrived to take over the watch; he didn’t want Polaner to wake and find himself alone. Ben Yakov hadn’t made an appearance that morning, and no one had heard from Rosen since he’d left the hospital in search of Lemarque.
Now he forced himself to look at his textbook: a list of statics problems swarming in an antlike blur. He willed the numbers and letters into an intelligible order, penciled neat columns of figures onto a clean sheet of graph paper. He calculated the force vectors acting upon fifty steel rods in a load-bearing wall of reinforced concrete, located the points of highest tension along a cathedral buttress, estimated the wind sway of a hypothetical steel structure twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Each building with its quiet internal math, the numbers floating within the structures. An hour passed as he made his way through the list of problems. At last Tibor groaned and sat up in bed.
“Orrh,” he said. “Am I still in Paris?”
“I’m afraid so,” Andras said.
Tibor insisted on taking Andras to dinner. They went to a Basque restaurant that was supposed to serve good oxtail soup. The waiter was a broad-shouldered bully who banged the plates onto the tables and shouted curses at the kitchen. The soup was thin, the meat overcooked, but they drank Basque beer that made Andras feel flushed and sentimental. Here was his brother at last, here they were together, dining in a foreign city like the grown men they’d become. Their mother would have laughed aloud to see them together in this mannish restaurant, leaning over their mugs of ale.
“Be honest,” Andras said. “How’s Anya? Her letters are too cheerful. I’m afraid she wouldn’t tell me if something were wrong.”
“I went to Konyár the weekend before I left,” Tibor said. “Mátyás was there too. Anya’s trying to convince Apa to move to Debrecen for the winter. She wants him close to a good doctor if he gets pneumonia again. He won’t go, of course. He insists he won’t get sick, as though he had any control over that. And when I take Anya’s side, he asks me who I think I am to tell him what to do. You’re not a doctor yet, Tibi, he says. And he shakes his finger at me.”
Andras laughed, though he knew it was a serious matter; they both knew how ill their father had been, and how their mother relied on him. “What will they do?”
“Stay in Konyár, for now.”
“And Mátyás?”
Tibor shook his head. “A strange thing happened the night before I left. Matyás and I went walking out to the rail bridge above that creek, the one where we used to catch minnows in the summer.”
“I know the one,” Andras said.
“It was a cold night to be out walking. The bridge was icy. We never should have been up there in the first place. Well, we stood there for a while looking at the stars, and we started talking about Anya and Apa, about what Mátyás might have to do if something happened to them, and he was angry at me, you know—I was leaving him to handle everything alone, he said. I tried to tell him they’d be fine, and that if anything truly bad happened, you and I would come home, and he said we’d never come home, that you were gone for good and that I would be soon. We were having this argument above that frozen creek, and then we heard a train coming.”
“I don’t know if I want to hear the end of this.”
“So Mátyás says, ‘Stay on the bridge. Stand here beside the tracks, on the crossties. See if we can keep our balance when the train comes by. Think you can? Not scared, are you?’ The train’s coming fast now. And you know that bridge, Andras. The ties give you about a meter on each side of the tracks. And it’s maybe twenty meters above the creek. So he jumps onto the ties between the rails and stands there facing the train. It’s coming on. The light from the headlamp’s already on him. I’m shouting at him to get off, but he’s not going anywhere. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he says. ‘Let it come.’ So I run at him and put him over my shoulder like a sack of sawdust, and I swear to God, the bridge was iced so badly I nearly fell and killed us both. I got him off and threw him in the snow. The train came by about a second later. He stood up laughing like a madman afterward, and I got up and hit him across the jaw. I wanted to break his neck, the little idiot.”
“I would have broken his neck!”
“Believe me, I wanted to.”
“He didn’t want you to go. He’s all alone there now.”
“Not exactly,” Tibor said. “He’s got quite a life in Debrecen. Nothing like our school days. He and I made it up the next day, and I went back there with him on the way to Budapest. You should see what he’s been doing at that nightclub where he performs! He ought to be in movies. He’s like Fred Astaire, but with back handsprings and somersaults. And they pay him to do it! I might be happy for him if I didn’t think he’s completely lost his mind. He’s inches from being kicked out of school, you know. He’s failing Latin and history and barely sliding by in his other classes. I’m sure he’ll quit as soon as he saves enough for a ticket out of Hungary. Anya and Apa know it, too.”
“You didn’t tell them about that bridge business, did you?”
“Are you joking?”
They signaled to the waiter for another round of drinks. While they waited, Andras asked about Budapest and their old Hársfa utca and the Jewish Quarter.
“It’s all much the same as when you left,” Tibor said. “Though everyone’s increasingly worried that Hitler’s going to drag Europe into another war.”
“If he does, the Jews will get the blame. Here in France, at least.”
The waiter returned, and Tibor took a long, thoughtful drink of Basque beer. “Not as much fraternité or égalité as you once thought, is there?”
Andras told him about the meeting of Le Grand Occident, and then about what had happened to Polaner. Tibor took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with his handkerchief, and put them on again.
“I was talking to a man on the train who’d just been in Munich,” he said. “A Hungarian journalist sent to report on a rally there. He saw three men beaten to death for destroying copies of a state-sponsored anti-Jewish newspaper. Insurgents, the German press called them. One of them was a decorated officer from the Great War.”
Andras sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “With Polaner the situation’s personal,” he said. “There are questions about his relationship with one of the men who did it.”
“It’s just the same brand of hatred writ small,” Tibor said. “Horrible any way you look at it.”
“I was a fool to think things would be different here.”
“Europe’s changing,” Tibor said. “The picture’s getting bleaker everywhere. But it hasn’t all been grim for you here, I hope.”
“It hasn’t.” He looked up at Tibor and managed a smile.
“What’s that about, Andráska?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you harboring secrets? Have you got some intrigue going on?”
“You’ll have to buy me a stronger drink,” Andras said.
At a nearby bar they ordered whiskey, and he told Tibor everything: about the invitation to the Morgensterns’, and how he’d recognized the name and address from the letter; how he’d fallen in love with Klara, not Elisabet; how they’d failed to keep the attraction at bay. How Klara had told him nothing about what had brought her to Paris, or why her identity had to be kept a secret. When he’d finished, Tibor held on to his glass and stared.
“How much older is she?”
There was no way around it. “Nine years.”
“Good God,” Tibor said. “You’re in love with a grown woman. This is serious, Andras, do you understand?”
“Serious as death.”
“Put down that glass. I’m talking to you.”
“I’m listening.”
“She’s thirty-one,” Tibor said. “She’s not a girl. What are your intentions?”
A tightness gathered in Andras’s throat. “I want to marry her,” he said.
“Of course. And you’ll live on what?”
“Believe me, I’ve thought about that.”
“Four and a half more years,” Tibor said. “That’s how long it’ll take you to get your degree. She’ll be thirty-six. When you’re her age, she’ll be nearly forty. And when you’re forty, she’ll be—”
“Stop it,” Andras said. “I can do the math.”
“But have you?”
“So what? So what if she’s forty-nine when I’m forty?”
“What happens when you’re forty and a thirty-year-old woman starts paying attention to you? Do you think you’ll stay faithful to your wife?”
“Tibi, do you have to do this?”
“What about the daughter? Does she know what’s going on between you and her mother?”
Andras shook his head. “Elisabet detests me, and she’s terrible to Klara. I doubt she’d take kindly to the situation.”
“And József Hász? Does he know you’ve fallen in love with his aunt?”
“No. He doesn’t know his aunt’s whereabouts. The family doesn’t trust him with the information, whatever that means.”
Tibor laced his fingers. “Good God, Andras, I don’t envy you.”
“I was hoping you’d tell me what to do.”
“I know what I’d do. I’d break it off as soon as I could.”
“You haven’t even met her.”
“What difference would that make?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you might want to. Aren’t you even curious?”
“Desperately,” he said. “But I won’t participate in your undoing. Not even as a spectator.” And he called the waiter over and requested the bill, then firmly changed the subject.
In the morning Andras brought Tibor to the École Spéciale, where they met Vago at his office. When they entered, Vago was sitting behind his desk and talking on the telephone in his particular manner: He held the mouthpiece between his cheek and shoulder and gesticulated with both hands. He sketched the shape of a flawed building in the air, then erased it with a sweep of his arm, then sketched another building, this one with a roof that seemed flat but was not flat, to allow for drainage—and then the conversation was over, and Andras introduced Tibor to Vago at last, there in the room where he had been the subject of so many morning conversations, as though the talking itself had caused Tibor to materialize.
“Off to Modena,” Vago said. “I envy you. You’ll love Italy. You won’t ever want to go back to Budapest.”
“I’m grateful for your help,” Tibor said. “If I can ever repay the favor …”
Vago waved the idea away. “You’ll become a doctor,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I won’t need your favors.” Then he gave them the news from the hospital: Polaner was holding steady; the doctors had decided not to operate yet. Of Lemarque there was still no sign. Rosen had kicked down the door of his rooming house the day before, but he was nowhere to be found.
Tibor sat through the morning classes with Andras. He heard Andras present his solution to the statics problem about the cathedral buttress, and he let Andras show him his drawings in studio. He met Ben Yakov and Rosen, who quickly exhausted the few words of Hungarian they’d learned from Andras; Tibor bantered with them in his sparse but fearless French. At noon, over lunch at the school café, Rosen talked about his trip to Lemarque’s rooming house. He looked depleted now; his face had lost its angry flush, and his russet-colored freckles seemed to float on the surface of his skin. “What a rathole,” he said. “A hundred cramped dark rooms full of smelly men. It stank worse than a prison. You could almost feel sorry for the bastard, living in a place like that.” He paused to give a broad yawn. He’d been up all night at the hospital.
“And nothing?” Ben Yakov said. “Not a trace of him?”
Rosen shook his head. “I searched the place from basement to attic. Nobody had seen him, or at least they claimed they hadn’t.”
“And what if you’d found him?” Tibor asked.
“What would I have done, you mean? At the time, I would have choked him to death with my bare hands. But I would have been a fool to do it. We need to know who his accomplices were.”
The student café began to clear. Doors opened and slammed all around the atrium as students filtered into the classrooms. Tibor watched them go, his eyes grave behind his silver-rimmed glasses.
“What are you thinking about?” Andras asked him in Hungarian.
“Lucky Béla,” Tibor said. “Ember embernek farkasa.”
“Speak French, Hungarians,” Rosen said. “What are you talking about?”
“Something our father used to say,” Andras said, and repeated the phrase.
“And what does that mean, in the parlance of the rest of the world?”
“Man is a wolf to man.”
That night they were supposed to go to a party at József Hász’s on the boulevard Saint-Jacques. It was to be the first time Andras would spend an evening at József’s since the beginning of his liaison with Klara. The idea made him anxious, but József had invited him in person a week earlier; a few of his paintings were to appear in a student show at the Beaux-Arts, which Andras must be sure to miss because it would be a terrible bore, but after the opening there would be drinks and dinner at József’s. Andras had demurred on the basis that Tibor would be in town and that he couldn’t burden József with another guest, but that had only made József insist all the more: If Tibor were in Paris for the first time, he couldn’t miss a party at József Hász’s.
When they arrived, the company was already drunk. A trio of poets stood on the sofa and shouted verse in three-part cacophony while a girl in a green leotard performed acts of contortion on the Oriental rug. József himself presided over the card table, winning at poker while the other players scowled at their dwindling piles of money.
“The Hungarians have arrived!” József said when he saw them. “Now we’ll have a real game. Pull up a chair, men! Play cards.”
“I’m afraid we can’t,” Andras said. “We’re broke.”
József dealt a hand with dazzling speed. “Eat, then,” he said. “If you’re broke, you’re probably hungry. Aren’t you hungry?” He didn’t look up from his cards. “Visit the buffet.”
On the dining table was a raft of baguettes, three wheels of cheese, pickles, apples, figs, a chocolate torte, six bottles of wine.
“Now that’s a welcome sight,” Tibor said. “Free dinner.”
They made sandwiches of figs and cheese and took them to the large front room, where they watched the contortionist become a circle, a bell, a Spanish knot. Afterward she posed erotically with another girl, while a third girl took photographs with an ancient-looking camera.
Tibor watched in a mesmeric trance. “Does Hász have parties like this often?” he asked, following the girls with his eyes as they shifted to a new pose.
“More often than you’d imagine,” Andras said.
“How many people live in this apartment?”
“Just him.”
Tibor let out a low whistle.
“There’s hot water in the bathroom, too.”
“Now you’re exaggerating.”
“No, I’m not. And a porcelain tub with lion feet. Come see.” He led Tibor down the hall toward the back of the apartment and paused at the bathroom door, which stood open just enough to show a sliver of white porcelain. A glow of candles emanated from within. Andras opened the door. There, blinking against the glare from the hallway, was a couple standing against the wall, the girl’s hair disheveled, the top buttons of her shirt undone. The girl was Elisabet Morgenstern, one hand raised against the light.
“Pardon us, gentlemen,” the man said in American-accented French, each word delivered with drink-soaked languor.
Elisabet had recognized Andras at once. “Stop looking at me, you stupid Hungarian!” she said.
Andras took a step backward into the hall, pulling Tibor along with him. The man gave them a wink of drunken triumph and kicked the door closed.
“Well,” Tibor said. “I suppose we’d better examine the plumbing later.”
“That might be best.”
“And who was that darling girl? She seems to know you.”
“That darling girl was Elisabet Morgenstern.”
“The Elisabet? Klara’s daughter?”
“The.”
“And who was the man?”
“Someone awfully brave, that’s for sure.”
“Does József know Elisabet?” Tibor said. “Do you think the secret’s out between them?”
Andras shook his head. “No idea. Elisabet does seem to live her own life outside the house. But József’s never mentioned a secret cousin, which I’m certain he would have, as much as he loves to gossip.” His temples began to pound as he wondered what exactly he had discovered, and what he would tell Klara.
They wove their way back to the sofa and sat down to watch the guests play charades; a girl appropriated Andras’s coat and wore it over her head like a hood while she stooped to pick invisible flowers. The others called out the titles of films Andras had never seen. He needed another glass of wine, and was ready to get up and look for one when Elisabet’s lover staggered into the room. The man, blond and broad-shouldered and wearing an expensive-looking merino jacket, tucked his shirt into his trousers and smoothed his hair. He raised a hand in greeting and sat down on the couch between Andras and Tibor.
“How are we, gentlemen?” he asked in his languid French. “You’re not having nearly as much fun as I am, from the look of it.” He sounded like the Hollywood stars who did commercials for Radio France. “That girl’s quite a firecracker. I met her on a ski vacation over Christmas, and I’m afraid I’ve become addicted to her.”
“We were just leaving,” Andras said. “We’ll be on our way now.”
“No, sir!” the blond American crowed. He put an arm across Andras’s chest. “No one goes! We’re staying all night!”
Down the hall came Elisabet, shaking drops of water from her hands. She’d hastily rearranged her hair and misbuttoned her blouse. When she reached the front room, she beckoned to Andras with a single urgent sweep of her hand. Andras got up from the sofa and excused himself with a half bow, then followed Elisabet down the hall. She led him to József’s bedroom, where a deluge of coats had overflowed the bed and pooled on the floor.
“All right,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Tell me what you saw.”
“Nothing!” Andras said. “Not a thing.”
“If you tell my mother about Paul, I’ll kill you.”
“When would I tell her, now that you’ve banished me from your house?”
Elisabet’s look became shrewd. “Don’t play innocent with me,” she said. “I know you haven’t spent the past two months hoping I’d fall in love with you. I know what’s going on between you and my mother. I could see how she looked at you. I’m not a fool, Andras. She might not tell me everything, but I’ve known her long enough to be able to tell when she’s got a lover. And you’re just her type. Or one of her types, I should say.”
Now it was his turn to show a self-conscious flush; I could see how she looked at you. And how he must have looked at her. How could anyone have failed to see it? He glanced down at the hearth; a silver cigarette case lay among the ashes, its monogram obscured. “You know she wouldn’t want you to be here,” he said. “Does she know you know József Hász?”
“That idiot who lives here, you mean? Why, is he some sort of notorious criminal?”
“Not exactly,” Andras said. “He can throw a rather rough party, that’s all.”
“I just met him tonight. He’s some friend of Paul’s from school.”
“And you met Paul in Chamonix?”
“I don’t see where that’s any business of yours. And I mean it, Andras, you can’t tell my mother about any of this. She’ll lock me in my room for life.” She tugged at her shirt, and when she saw she’d buttoned it wrong, pronounced an unladylike curse.
“I won’t tell,” he said. “Upon my honor.”
Elisabet scowled at him, seeming to doubt his trustworthiness; but behind her hard look there was a flash of vulnerability, a consciousness that he held the key to something that mattered to her. Andras wasn’t certain whether it was Paul himself she loved, or whether it was simply the freedom to carry on a life beyond her mother’s scrutiny, but in either case he understood. He spoke his pledge again. Her tight-held shoulders relaxed a single degree, and she let out a truncated sigh. Then she fished a pair of coats from the pile on the bed, brushed past him into the hall, and returned to the front room, where Paul and Tibor were still watching the charades.
“It’s late, Paul,” Elisabet said, throwing his coat onto his lap. “Let’s go.”
“It’s early!” Paul said. “Come sit here with us and watch these girls.”
“I can’t. I have to get home.”
“Come to me, lioness,” he said, and took her wrist.
“If I have to go home alone, I will,” she said, and pulled away.
Paul got up from the sofa and kissed Elisabet on the mouth. “Stubborn girl,” he said. “I hope this gentleman wasn’t rude to you.” He gave Andras a wink.
“This gentleman has the deepest respect for the young lady,” Andras said.
Elisabet rolled her eyes. “All right,” she said. “That’s enough.” She shrugged into her coat, gave Andras a last warning look, and went to the door. Paul snapped a salute and followed her into the hallway.
“Well,” Tibor said. “I think you’d better sit down and tell me what that was all about.”
“She begged me not to tell her mother that I saw her with that man.”
“And what did you say?”
“I swore I’d never tell.”
“Not that you’d have the opportunity anyway.”
“Well,” Andras said. “It seems Elisabet has figured out what’s going on between her mother and me.”
“Ah. So the secret’s out.”
“That one is, anyway. She seemed not at all surprised. She said I was her mother’s type, whatever that means. But she doesn’t seem to have any idea that József’s her cousin.” He sighed. “Tibor, what in God’s name am I doing?”
“That’s just what I’ve been asking you,” Tibor said, and put an arm around Andras’s shoulders. A moment later József Hász appeared, three glasses of champagne in his hands. He passed them each a glass and toasted their health.
“Are you having fun?” he said. “Everyone must have fun.”
“Oh, yes,” Andras said, grateful for the champagne.
“I see you’ve met my American friend Paul,” József said. “His father’s an industrial chieftain. Automobile tires or some such thing. That new girlfriend of his is a little sharp-tongued for my taste, but he’s wild about her. Maybe he thinks that’s just the way French girls act.”
“If that’s the way French girls act, you gentlemen are in trouble,” Tibor said.
“Here’s to trouble,” József said, and they drained their glasses.
The next day Andras and Tibor walked the long halls of the Louvre, taking in the velvet-brown shadows of Rembrandt and the frivolous curlicues of Fragonard and the muscular curves of the classical marbles; then they strolled along the quais to the Pont d’Iéna and stood beneath the monumental arches of the Tower. They circumnavigated the Gare d’Orsay as Andras described how he’d built his model; finally they backtracked to the Luxembourg, where the apiary stood in silent hibernation. They sat with Polaner at the hospital as he slept through the nurses’ ministrations; Polaner, whose terrible story Andras hadn’t yet told Klara. They watched him sleep for nearly an hour. Andras wished he’d wake, wished he wouldn’t look so pale and still; the nurses said he was better that day, but Andras couldn’t see any change. Afterward they walked to the Sarah-Bernhardt, where Tibor lent a hand with the closing-down. They stowed the coffee things and folded the wooden table, cleared the actors’ pigeonholes of ancient messages, shuttled stray props to the prop room and costumes to the costume shop, where Madame Courbet was folding garments into her neatly labeled cabinets. Claudel gave Andras a half-full box of cigars—a former prop—and apologized for having told him so many times to burn in hell. He hoped Andras could forgive him, now that they’d both been cast upon the whims of fate.
Andras forgave him. “I know you didn’t mean any harm,” he said.
“That’s a good boy,” Claudel said, and kissed him on both cheeks. “He’s a good boy,” he told Tibor. “A darling.”
Monsieur Novak met them in the hallway as they were on their way out. He called them into his office, where he produced three cut-crystal glasses and poured out the last of a bottle of Tokaji. They toasted Tibor’s studies in Italy, and then they toasted the eventual reopening of the Sarah-Bernhardt and the three other theaters that were closing that week. “A city without theater is like a party without conversation,” Novak said. “No matter how good the food and drink are, people will find it dull. Aristophanes said that, I believe.”
“Thank you for keeping my brother out of the gutter,” Tibor said.
“Oh, he would have found a way without me,” Novak said, and put a hand on Andras’s shoulder.
“It was your umbrella that saved him,” Tibor said. “Otherwise he would have missed his train. And then he might have lost his nerve.”
“No, not him,” Novak said. “Not our Mr. Lévi. He would have been all right. And so will you, my young man, in Italy.” He shook Tibor’s hand and wished him luck.
It was dark by the time they left. They walked along the quai de Gesvres as the lights of the bridges and barges shivered on the water. A wind tore through the river channel, flattening Andras’s coat against his back. He knew Klara was in her studio at that hour, teaching the final segment of her evening class. Without telling Tibor where they were going he steered them down the rue François Miron in the direction of the rue de Sévigné. He traced the route he hadn’t walked in weeks. And there on the corner, its light spilling into the street, was the dance studio with its demi-curtains, its sign that said MME. MORGENSTERN, MAÎTRESSE. The faint sound of phonograph music reached them through the glass: the slow, stately Schumann she used for the end-of-class révérences. This was a class of intermediate girls, slender ten-year-olds with downy napes, their shoulder blades like small sharp wings beneath the cotton of their leotards. At the front of the room Klara led them through a series of sweeping curtseys. Her hair was gathered into a loose roll at the base of her neck, and she wore a practice dress of plum-colored viscose, tied at the waist with a black ribbon. Her arms were supple and strong, her features tranquil. She needed no one; she had made a life, and here it was: these end-of-day révérences, her own daughter upstairs, Mrs. Apfel, the warm rooms of the flat she’d bought for herself. And yet from him, from Andras Lévi, a twenty-two-year-old student at the École Spéciale, she seemed to want something: the luxury of vulnerability, perhaps; the sharp thrill of uncertainty. As he watched, his heart seemed to go still in his chest.
“There she is,” he said. “Klara Morgenstern.”
“God,” Tibor said. “She’s beautiful, that’s for certain.”
“Let’s see if she’ll have dinner with us.”
“No, Andras. I’m not going to do it.”
“Why not?” he said. “You came here to see how I live, didn’t you? This is it. If you don’t meet her, you won’t know.”
Tibor watched as Klara lifted her arms; the children lifted their arms and swept into low curtseys.
“She’s tiny,” Tibor said. “She’s a wood nymph.”
Andras tried to see her as Tibor was seeing her—tried to see her for the first time. There was something fearless, something girlish, about the way she moved her body, as if part of her remained a child. But her eyes held the look of a woman who had seen one lifetime pass into another. That was what made her like a nymph, Andras thought: the way she seemed to embody both timelessness and the irrevocable passage of time. The music reached its end, and the girls rushed for their satchels and coats. Tibor and Andras watched them leave. Then they met Klara at the studio door, where she stood shivering in her practice dress.
“Andras,” she said, reaching for his hand. He was relieved that she seemed glad to see him; he hadn’t known how she’d react to his coming to the studio. But there was nothing wrong with his stopping in as he passed through the Marais, he told himself; it was an ordinary thing, something an acquaintance might have done.
“This is a surprise,” she said. “And who’s this gentleman?”
“This is Tibor,” Andras said. “My brother.”
Klara took his hand. “Tibor Lévi!” she said. “At last. I’ve been hearing about you for months.” She glanced over her shoulder, up the stairs. “But what are the two of you doing here? I know you haven’t come to take a lesson.”
“Have dinner with us,” Andras said.
She laughed, a little nervously. “I’m hardly dressed for it.”
“We’ll have a drink and wait for you.”
She put a hand to her mouth and glanced over her shoulder again. From the apartment came the sound of quick footsteps and the rustle of outdoor garments. “My inscrutable daughter is dining out with friends tonight.”
“Come, then,” Andras said. “We’ll keep you company.”
“All right,” she said. “Where will you be?”
Andras named a place that served bouillabaisse with slabs of thick brown bread. They both loved it; they’d been there during their ten days together in December.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Klara said, and ran upstairs.
The restaurant had once been a smithy, and still smelled faintly of cinders and iron. The smelting ovens had been converted to cooking ovens; there were rough-hewn wooden tables, a menu full of cheap dishes, and strong apple cider served in earthenware bowls. They sat down at one of the tables and ordered drinks.
“So that was your Klara,” Tibor said, and shook his head. “She can’t be the mother of that girl we met at the party last night.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“What a disaster! How did she come by that child? She must have been little more than a girl herself at the time.”
“She was fifteen,” Andras said. “I don’t know anything about the father, except that he’s long dead. She doesn’t like to talk about any of it.”
She came in just as they were ordering a second round of drinks. She hung her red hat and her coat on a hook beside the table and sat down with them, tucking a few damp strands of hair behind her ear. Andras felt the heat of her legs close to his own; he touched the folds of her dress beneath the table. She raised her eyes to him and asked if anything were wrong. He couldn’t tell her, of course, what was most immediately wrong: that Tibor objected to their liaison, at least in theory. So he told her instead what had happened to Polaner at the École Spéciale.
“What a nightmare,” she said when he’d finished, and put her forehead into her hands. “That poor boy. And what about his parents? Has someone written to them?”
“He asked us not to. He’s ashamed, you know.”
“Of course. My God.”
The three of them sat in silence, looking at their bowls of cider. When Andras glanced at Tibor it seemed to him that his brother’s look had softened; it was as though, in the shadow of what had happened to Polaner, it had become an absurdity, a luxury, to hold an opinion about the rightness or wrongness of love. Tibor asked Klara about the class she’d been teaching, and she asked what he thought of Paris and whether he’d have time to see Italy before school began.
“There won’t be much time to travel,” Tibor said. “Classes start next week.”
“And what will you study first?”
“Anatomy.”
“You’ll find it fascinating,” she said. “I did.”
“You’ve studied anatomy?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “In Budapest, as part of my ballet training. I had a master who believed in teaching the physics and mechanics of the human body. He made us read books with anatomical drawings that disgusted most of the girls—and some of the boys, too, though they tried not to show it. And one day he took us to the medical school at Budapest University, where the students were dissecting cadavers. He had one of the professors show us all the muscles and tendons and bones of the leg and the arm. Then the back, the spine. Two girls fainted, I remember. But I loved it.”
Tibor looked at her with reluctant admiration. “And do you think it improved your dancing?”
“I don’t know. I think it helps my teaching. It helps me explain things.” She became pensive for a moment, touching the stitched edge of her napkin. “You know, I have some of those anatomy books at home. More than I need or use. I should make you a gift of one of them, if you’ve got room in your luggage.”
“I couldn’t,” Tibor said, but a familiar covetousness had come into his eyes. Their father’s mania for old books had become their own; Tibor and Andras had spent hours at the used bookstores in Budapest, where Tibor had taken down one ancient anatomy book after another and showed Andras in color-plated detail the shy curve of a pancreas, the cumular cluster of a lung. He pined for those gorgeous tomes he could never afford, not even at the used booksellers’ prices.
“I insist,” Klara said. “You’ll come by after dinner and choose one.”
And so, after the bouillabaisse and another round of cider, they went to the rue de Sévigné and climbed the stairs to Klara’s apartment. Here was the sitting room where he’d seen her for the first time; here was the nest-shaped bowl with its candy eggs, the gray velvet sofa, the phonograph, the amber-shaded lamps—the intimate landscape of her life, denied him for the past month. From one of the bookshelves she extracted three large leather-bound anatomy books. She laid them on the writing desk and opened the gold-stamped covers. Tibor unfolded the leaves of illustrations to reveal the mysteries of the human body in four-color ink: the bones with their woven sheaths of muscle, the spiderweb of the lymphatic system, the coiled snake of the intestines, the small windowed room of the eye. The heaviest and most beautiful of all the volumes was a folio copy of Corpus Humanum, printed in Latin and inscribed for Klara in the bold angular script of her ballet master, Viktor Romankov: Sine scientia ars nihil est. Budapest 1920.
She took that volume from Tibor and replaced it in its leather box. “This is the one I want to give you,” she said, laying it in his arms.
He flushed and shook his head. “I couldn’t possibly.”
“I want you to have it,” she said. “For your studies.”
“I’ll be traveling. I wouldn’t want to damage it.” He held it toward her again.
“No,” she said. “Take it. You’ll be glad to have it. I’ll be glad to think of it in Modena. It’s a small thing, considering what you’ve had to do to get there.”
Tibor looked down at the book in his hands. He raised his eyes to meet Andras’s, but Andras wouldn’t look at him; he knew that if he did, this would become a matter of whether or not Tibor approved of what existed between Andras and Klara. So he kept his own gaze fixed on the fireplace screen, with its faded scene of a horse and rider in a shadowy wood, and let Tibor’s desire for that gorgeous folio make the decision for him. After another moment of hesitation, Tibor made gruff avowals of his gratitude and let Klara wrap the book in brown paper.
On Tibor’s final day in Paris, he and Andras rode the thundering Métro to Boulogne-Billancourt. The afternoon was warm for January, windless and dry. They walked the long quiet avenues, past the bakeries and greengrocers and haberdashers, out toward the neighborhood where Pingusson’s white ocean-liner building cut through the air as though en route to the sea. Andras told the story of the poker game wherein Perret’s loss had been transformed into a scholarship; then he led his brother farther along the rue Denfert-Rochereau, where buildings by Le Corbusier and Mallet-Stevens and Raymond Fischer and Pierre Patout stood radiating their austere, unadorned strength. In the months since his first visit here, Andras had returned again and again to this small cluster of streets where the living architects he admired most had built small-scale shrines to simplicity and beauty. One morning not long ago he had come upon Perret’s Villa Gordin, a blocklike and vaguely Japanese-looking house built for a sculptor, with a bank of reflective windows offset by two rectangles of perpendicularly laid bricks. Perret might have built anything he liked on any empty piece of land in Paris, but had chosen to do this: to create a work of Spartan simplicity, a human-sized space for an artist on a tiny street where a person could work and be alone. The building had become Andras’s favorite in Boulogne-Billancourt. They sat down on the curb across the street and he told his brother about the Latvian-born sculptor who lived there, Dora Gordin, and about the airy studio Perret had designed for her at the back of the house.
“Remember those huts you used to build in Konyár?” Tibor said. “Your housing business?”
The housing business. The summer he turned nine, just before he’d started school in Debrecen, he had become a building contractor for the neighborhood boys. He had a monopoly on scrap wood, and could build a fort or clubhouse in half a day. Four-year-old Mátyás was his assistant. Mátyás would come along on the jobs and solemnly hand nails to Andras as Andras pounded the huts together. In return for his building services, Andras collected whatever the boys had to offer: a photograph of someone’s father in a soldier’s uniform, a fleet of tiny tin warplanes, a cat’s skull, a balsa boat, a white mouse in a cage. That summer he had been the richest boy in town.
“Remember my mouse?” Andras said. “Remember what you used to call him?”
“Eliahu ha Navi.”
“Anya hated that. She thought it was sacrilegious.” He smiled and flexed his fingers against the cold curb. The shadows were lengthening, and the chill had made its way through the layers of his clothing. He was ready to suggest they keep walking, but Tibor leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the roof garden with its row of little evergreens.
“That was the year I fell in love for the first time,” he said. “I never told you. You were too young to understand, and by the time you were old enough I was in love with someone else, Zsuzsanna, that girl I used to take to dances at gimnázium. But before her there was a girl named Rózsa Geller. Rózsika. I was thirteen, she was sixteen. She was the oldest daughter of the family I boarded with in Debrecen. The ones who moved away just before you came to school.”
Andras caught an unfamiliar edge in Tibor’s voice, almost a note of bitterness. “Sixteen,” he said, and gave a low whistle. “An older woman.”
“I used to watch her bathing. She used to bathe in the kitchen in a tin washtub, and my bed was on the other side of the curtain. That curtain was full of holes. She must have known I was watching.”
“And you saw everything.”
“Everything. She would stand there pouring water over herself and humming the Marseillaise.”
“Why the Marseillaise?”
“She was in love with some French film star. He’d been in a lot of war movies.”
“Pierre Fresnay.”
“That’s right, that was the bastard’s name. How did you know?”
“That friend of mine, Ben Yakov, looks just like him.”
“Hm. I’m glad I didn’t know that when I met your friend.”
“So what happened?”
“One day her father caught me watching. He beat me bloody. Broke my arm.”
“You broke your arm playing football!”
“That was the official story. Her father said he’d turn me over to the police if I told the truth. They put me out of the house. I never saw her again.”
“Oh, God, Tibor. I never knew.”
“That was the idea.”
“It’s terrible! You were only thirteen.”
“And she was sixteen. She knew better than to let it go on. She must have known I’d get caught eventually. Maybe she wanted me to get caught.” He stood and brushed the dust from his trousers. “So you see, that’s my experience with older women.”
There was a motion behind one of the windows of the house, the shadow of a woman crossing a square of light. Andras stood up beside his brother. He imagined the sculptor coming to her window, seeing them loitering there as if they were waiting to catch a glimpse of her.
“I’m not thirteen,” Andras said. “Klara’s not sixteen.”
“No, indeed,” Tibor said. “You’re adults. Which means the consequences may be graver if you get in over your heads.”
“It’s too late,” Andras said. “I’m already in over my head. I don’t know what’ll happen. I’m at her mercy.”
“I hope she’ll show some mercy, then,” Tibor said. And he used the Yiddish word rachmones, the same word that had called Andras back to himself three months earlier at the Jardin du Luxembourg.
The next morning they carried Tibor’s bags to the Gare de Lyon, just as they’d carried Andras’s bags to Nyugati Station when he’d left for Paris. Now it was Tibor going off to an unknown life in a foreign place, Tibor going off to study and work and navigate the dark passageways of a foreign language. The wind roared through the channels of the boulevards and tried to twist the suitcases from their hands; the previous day’s warm weather was gone as though they’d only dreamed it. Paris was as gray as it had been the day Andras had arrived. He wished he had an excuse to keep Tibor with him another day, another week. Tibor was right, of course. It was a foolish thing Andras had done, getting involved with Klara Morgenstern. He’d already ventured into dangerous terrain, had found himself edging along a dwindling path toward a blind corner of rock. He didn’t have the shoes for this, nor the provisions, nor the clothing, nor the foresight, nor the mental strength, nor the experience. All he had was a kind of reckless hope—something, he imagined, not unlike the hope that had sent fifteenth-century explorers hurtling off the map. Having pointed out how ill-equipped Andras was, how could Tibor now let him go on alone? How could he step onto a train and speed off to Italy, even if medical school waited at the other end? His role had always been to show Andras the way when the way was obscure—at times, in their boyhood, quite literally, his hand was Andras’s only guide in the dark. But now they had reached the Gare de Lyon; there was the train itself, black and impassive on its tracks.
“All right, then,” Tibor said. “Off I go.”
Stay, Andras wanted to say. “Good luck,” he said.
“Write to me. And don’t get in trouble. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. I’ll see you before long.”
Liar, Andras wanted to say.
Tibor put a hand on Andras’s sleeve. He looked as if he meant to say something more, a few final words in Hungarian before he boarded a train full of Italian- and French-speakers, but he was silent as he glanced off toward the vast mouth of the station and the tangle of tracks that lay beyond it. He stepped up onto the train and Andras handed him his leather satchel. His silver-rimmed glasses slid down the bridge of his nose; he pushed them back with his thumb.
“Write me when you get there,” Andras said.
Tibor touched his cap and disappeared into the third-class car, and was gone.
When the train had left the station, Andras went back through the SORTIE doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn’t care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs. His feet led him farther from his brother, westward across town to the boulevard Raspail, all the way to the École Spéciale, and in through the blue doors of the courtyard.
The yard was full of students, all of them strangely silent, standing in head-bowed clumps of three and four. A heavy stillness hung in the air above the yard. It had a palpable black presence, like a flock of crows frozen midflight. On a splintered bench in a corner Perret himself sat with his head in his hands.
This was what had happened: By way of the slow-moving provincial post, the news of Polaner’s injuries had reached Lemarque in Bayeux, where he’d fled to his parents’ farm after the attack. The letter, written by his accomplices, told him that Polaner lay in the hospital on the brink of death, bleeding from internal wounds: an account meant to hearten Lemarque, to show him that all had not been in vain, that the work of the beating had continued after the attack. Having received this letter, Lemarque had written two of his own. One he addressed to the directors of the school, claiming responsibility for what had happened and naming three other students, third- and fourth-year men, who had participated. The other he addressed to Polaner, a brief admission of remorse and love. Late at night, after he’d left both letters on the kitchen table, he’d hanged himself from a crossbeam in his parents’ barn. His father had discovered the body that morning, cold and blue as the hibernal dawn itself.