IT WAS DECIDED—first in a late-night meeting at Perret’s office, then later still at the Blue Dove—that Andras would be the one to break the news of Lemarque’s death to Polaner. Perret believed it was his own responsibility as director of the school, but Vago argued that the delicacy of the situation called for special measures; it might be easier, he said, if the news were to come from a friend. Andras and Rosen and Ben Yakov agreed, and decided among themselves that Andras should be the one to give Polaner the letter. They would wait, of course, until the doctors considered him to be out of danger; there was reason to think that time might come soon. After a second week in the hospital the symptoms and aftereffects of internal bleeding had abated. Polaner’s disorientation had passed, his bruising and swelling had receded; he could eat and drink again on his own. He would be in a weakened state for nearly a month, the doctors said, while he remade the blood that had been lost, but all agreed that he had moved back from the brink. That weekend, in fact, he appeared so well recovered that Andras dared to approach one of his doctors and explain in careful French about Lemarque. The doctor, a long-faced internist who had made Polaner’s case his special project, expressed concern about the possible effects of the shock; but because the news could not be kept from Polaner forever, the doctor agreed that it might be better to tell him while he was still in the hospital and could be closely watched.
The next day, as Andras sat in the now-familiar steel chair beside the bed, he introduced the subject of the École Spéciale for the first time since the attack. Now that Polaner was mending so well, Andras said, the doctor thought he might consider a gradual return to his schoolwork. Could Andras bring him anything from the studio—his statics texts, his drawing tools, a sketchbook?
Polaner gave Andras a look of pity and closed his eyes. “I’m not going back to school,” he said. “I’m going home to Kraków.”
Andras laid a hand on his arm. “Is that what you want?”
Polaner let out a long breath. “It’s been decided for me,” he said. “They decided it.”
“Nothing’s been decided. You’ll go back to school if you want.”
“I can’t,” Polaner said, his eyes filling with tears. “How can I face Lemarque, or any of them? I can’t go to studio and sit down at my table as if nothing happened.”
There was no use waiting any longer; Andras took the letter from his pocket and put it into Polaner’s hands. Polaner spent a long moment looking at the envelope, at his name written in Lemarque’s sharp-edged print. Then he opened the letter and flattened the single sheet against his leg. He read the six lines in which Lemarque confessed himself and begged Polaner’s pardon, both for the attack and for what he felt he must do. When he’d finished reading, he folded the note again and lay back against the pillow, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling beneath the sheet.
“Oh, God,” he said in a half whisper. “It’s as though I killed him myself.”
Before that moment Andras had believed that his hate for Lemarque had reached its limit, that with Lemarque’s death his feelings had moved past hate toward something more like pity. But as he watched Polaner grieve, as he watched the familiar lines and planes of his friend’s face crumple under the burden of the news, he found himself shaking with anger. How much worse that Lemarque’s death had come with this confession of remorse and love! Now Polaner would always have to consider what had been lost, what might have been if the world had been a different place. Here was a cruelty beyond the attack and the death itself, a sting like that of certain fire nettles that grew on the Hajdú plain: Once the spine was in, it would work its way deeper into the wound and discharge its poison there for days, for weeks, while the victim burned.
He stayed with Polaner that night long past dark, ignoring the ward nurse’s reminder that visiting hours were over. When she insisted, he told her she would have to call the police to get rid of him; eventually the long-faced doctor interceded on Andras’s behalf, and he was allowed to stay all night and into the next morning. As he kept watch beside the bed, his mind kept returning to what Polaner had said at the Blue Dove in October: I just want to keep my head down. I want to study and get my degree. If it were in his power, he thought, he would not let Polaner’s shame and grief send him home to Kraków.
Another week passed before Polaner left the hospital. When he did, it was Andras who brought him home to his room on the boulevard Saint-Germain. He watched over Polaner’s injuries, kept him fed, took his clothes to the laundry, built up the fire in the grate when it burned low. One morning he returned from the bakery to find Polaner sitting up in bed with a drawing tablet angled against his knees; the coverlet was snowed with pencil shavings, the chair beside the bed strewn with charcoals. Andras said not a word as he deposited a pair of baguettes on the table. He prepared bread and jam and tea for Polaner and gave it to him in bed, then took a seat at Polaner’s table. And all morning the noise of Polaner’s pencil followed him through his own work like music.
Later that morning, Polaner stood before the mirror at the bureau and ran his hands over his stubble-shadowed chin. “I look like a criminal,” he said. “I look like I’ve been in jail for months.”
“You look a good deal better than you did a few weeks ago.”
“It seems absurd to think about a haircut,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“What’s absurd about it?”
“I don’t know. Everything. To begin with, I don’t know if I can sit in a barber’s chair and carry on a barbershop conversation.”
Andras stood beside Polaner at the mirror, regarding him in the glass. He himself looked neater than he had in weeks; Klara had given him a trim the night before, and had made him look something like a gentleman, though she liked his hair long.
“Look,” Andras said. “Suppose I were to ask a friend to come and cut your hair. Then you wouldn’t have to sit in a barber’s chair and trade stories with the barber.”
“What friend?” Polaner said, regarding Andras in the glass.
“A rather close friend.”
Polaner turned from the mirror to look at Andras directly. “A lady friend?”
“Exactement.”
“What lady friend, Andras? What’s been going on while I’ve been lying in bed?”
“I’m afraid this has been going on quite a while longer than that. Months, actually.”
Polaner gave Andras a fleet, shy smile; for that moment, and for the first time since the news of Lemarque’s death, he seemed to have slipped back into his own skin. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me all about it.”
“Now that I’ve mentioned it, I consider myself under an obligation.”
Polaner gestured toward a chair. “Tell,” he said.
The next night found Polaner seated on that same chair in the middle of the room, his shoulders draped in a tea towel, the mirror propped before him, while Klara Morgenstern ministered to him with scissors and comb and talked to him in her low hypnotic way. When Andras had spoken to her the night before, she had understood at once why she must do what he asked; she had cancelled her dinner plans to do it. Earlier that evening, on their way to Polaner’s, she’d held Andras’s hand with a kind of mute fervor as they crossed the Seine, her eyes downcast with what Andras imagined to be the memory of a similar grief. Now he stood near the fire and watched the locks of hair fall, silent with gratitude to this woman who understood the need to do this simple and intimate thing, to perform this act of restoration in an attic apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain.