BY THE NEXT MORNING he was dizzy with fever. Heat poured out of him and soaked the bed; then he was shaking with chills beneath his blanket and his jacket and his overcoat and three wool sweaters. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t get up for work, couldn’t go to school. When he got thirsty he drank the cold remains of tea straight from the kettle. When he had to piss he used the chamber pot beneath the bed. On the morning of the second day, when Polaner came looking for him, he didn’t have the strength to tell him to leave, though all he wanted was to be alone. Now it was Polaner who stepped into the role of nurse; he did it as though he’d done it all his life. He made Andras get out of bed and wash himself. He emptied the chamber pot, changed Andras’s sheets. He boiled water and brewed strong tea; he sent the concierge for soup and made Andras eat it. When Andras was clean and dressed and lying exhausted on the freshly made bed, Polaner made him tell him exactly what had happened. He took it all in with careful attention, and judged the situation grave, though not hopeless. The important thing now, he said, was for Andras to get well. There were two projects to be finished for studio. If he couldn’t get out of bed and get back to work, Polaner would suffer for it: They were team projects, and he and Andras were the team. Then there were exams to prepare for: statics and history of architecture. They would be given in ten days’ time. If Andras failed, he would lose his scholarship and be sent home. There was also the small matter of Andras’s job. For two days he’d sent no word to Monsieur Forestier.
Polaner said he would gather their things from the studio—Andras was too depleted from the fever to make the trip to the boulevard Raspail—and they would work on their projects all day. In the afternoon Polaner would go to the set-design studio with a note from Andras begging Monsieur Forestier’s pardon. Polaner would offer to do Andras’s copy work that night. In the meantime Andras would lay out a plan of study for the statics and the history exams.
He had never had a friend like Polaner, and would never have a better one as long as he lived. By the next day his job was secure, his final projects on their way to completion. They had to draw plans for a single-use building, a modern concert hall, and there were still problems to solve in the design: They had chosen a cylindrical shape for the exterior, and had to design a ceiling inside that would send the sound toward the audience without echo or distortion. When they were finished with the plans they would have to build a model. Arranging and rearranging cardboard forms consumed an entire day and night. Polaner didn’t mention going home; he slept on the floor, and was there when Andras woke in the morning.
At half past ten, just as Polaner was getting ready to go home, they heard a rising tread on the stairs. It seemed to Andras as if someone were climbing his very spine, toward the black and painful cavern of his heart. They heard a key in the lock, and the door edged open; it was Klara, her eyes dark beneath the brim of her spring hat.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you had company.”
“Monsieur Polaner is on his way home,” Polaner said. “Monsieur Lévi has had enough of me for now. I taxed his brain with architecture all night, though he was still recovering from a fever.”
“A fever?” Klara said. “Has the doctor been here?”
“Polaner’s been taking care of me,” Andras said.
“I’ve been a poor doctor,” Polaner said. “He looks like he’s lost weight. I’ll be off before I do any further damage.” He put on his own spring hat, of such a fashionable shape and color that you could miss the place where he’d resewn the brim to the crown, and he slipped into the hall, closing the door quietly behind him.
“A fever,” Klara said. “Are you feeling better now?”
He didn’t answer. She sat down in the wooden chair and touched the cardboard walls of the concert hall. “I should have told you about Zoltán,” she said. “This was a terrible way for you to find out. And there might have been worse ways. You worked together. Marcelle knew.”
He hated to think of it, of Madame Gérard knowing all and seeing all. “It was a bad enough way to find out,” he said.
“I want you to know it’s over,” Klara said. “I didn’t see him two weeks ago, and I won’t if he asks again.”
“I’m sure you’ve said that every time.”
“You have to believe me, Andras.”
“You’re still tied to him. You live in the house he bought you.”
“He made the down payment for me,” Klara said. “But I paid for the rest. Elisabet doesn’t know the details of our finances. Perhaps she doesn’t want to believe I support us. That would make it difficult for her to justify the way she behaves toward me.”
“But you did love him,” Andras said. “You still do. You took up with me to make him jealous, just as you did with those others. Marcel. And that writer, Édouard.”
“It’s true that when Zoltán turned away from me, I didn’t sit home alone. Not for long, in any case. When he claimed to be moving on with his life, I moved on with mine. But I didn’t care for Marcel or Édouard the way I cared for him, so I went back.”
“So it’s true, then,” Andras said. “You do love him.”
She sighed. “I don’t know. Zoltán and I are very close, or we were, once. But we didn’t give ourselves to each other. He couldn’t, because of what he felt for Edith; and I didn’t, also because of that. In the end I decided I didn’t want to be someone’s mistress for the rest of my life. And he decided we couldn’t keep on with it if he and Edith were to have a child.”
“And now?”
“I haven’t seen him since we made those decisions. Since November.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Sometimes,” she said, and folded her hands between her knees. “He was a dear friend, and he’s been a great help with Elisabet. She’s fond of him, too, or was. He’s the closest thing she’s had to a father. When we decided to end it, she felt as though he’d left both of us. She blamed me for it. I think she hoped I was seeing him again, those nights when I was with you.”
“And what now? What if he asks you again? You were together for eleven years, nearly a third of your life.”
“It’s finished, Andras. You’re in my life now.”
“Am I?” he said. “I thought you were finished with me. I didn’t know if you could forgive me for keeping Elisabet’s business from you.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she said, without a hint of humor. “Elisabet had no right to put you in that position, but once she did, you should have told me immediately. The man is five years older than she is—a rich American, studying painting at the Beaux-Arts on a lark. Not someone who’s likely to treat her kindly, or take her seriously. And worse than that, he knows my nephew.”
“You can hardly hold that against him,” Andras said. “I believe your nephew knows everyone between the ages of sixteen and thirty in the Quartier Latin.”
“In any case, it’s got to stop. I don’t intend to let that young man prove himself dishonorable.”
“And what about what Elisabet wants?”
“I’m afraid that’s beside the point.”
“But Elisabet won’t see it that way. If you oppose her, she’ll only become more resolved.”
Klara shook her head. “Don’t try to tell me how to raise that child, Andras.”
“I don’t claim to know how. But I do know how I felt at sixteen.”
“I told myself that was why you’d kept her secret,” Klara said. “I knew you felt a certain empathy with her, and I think it’s rather sweet of you, actually. But you’ve got to imagine my position, too.”
“I see. So you’ve put an end to things between Elisabet and Paul.”
“I hope so,” Klara said. “And I’ve punished her for showing you those letters.” Her brow folded into a familiar set of creases. “She seemed rather pleased with herself when she saw how upset I was about that. She told me I had gotten what I deserved. I’ve placed her under a kind of house arrest. Mrs. Apfel is keeping watch while I’m gone. Elisabet is not to go out until she writes you a letter of apology.”
“She’ll never do it. She’ll grow old and die first.”
“That will be her decision,” Klara said.
But he knew Elisabet wouldn’t remain bound by Klara’s house arrest for long, Mrs. Apfel notwithstanding. She’d soon find a way to escape, and he worried that when she did she’d leave no forwarding address. He didn’t want to be responsible for that.
“Let me come tomorrow and speak to her,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s any point.”
“Let me try.”
“She won’t see you. She’s been in a vicious mood.”
“It can’t have been as bad as my own.”
“You know what she’s like, Andras. She can be beastly.”
“I know. But she’s still just a girl, after all.”
Klara gave a deep sigh. “And what now?” she said, looking up at him from her chair. “What do we do, after all this?”
He ran a hand over the back of his neck. The question had been in his mind. “I don’t know, Klara. I don’t know. I’m going to sit down here on the bed. You can sit beside me if you like.” He waited until she sat beside him, and then he continued. “I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you the other night,” he said. “I acted as though you’d been unfaithful to me, but you haven’t, have you?”
“No,” she said, and put a hand on his knee, where it burned like a feverish bird. “What I feel for you would make that impossible. Or absurd, at the very least.”
“How is that, Klara? What is it you feel for me?”
“It may take me some time to answer that question,” she said, and smiled.
“I can’t be what he was. I can’t give you a place to live, or be anything like a father to Elisabet.”
“I have a place to live,” she said. “And Elisabet, though she’s still a child in many ways, will soon be grown. I don’t need now what I needed then.”
“What do you need now?”
She drew in her mouth in her pensive way. “I’m not certain, exactly. But I can’t seem to stand to be away from you. Even when I’m livid with anger at you.”
“There’s still a great deal I don’t know about you.” He stroked the curve of her back; he could feel the glowing coals of her vertebrae through her thin jersey.
“I hope there’ll be time to learn.”
He drew her down with him onto the bed, and she put her head on his shoulder. He ran his hand along the warm dark length of her hair and took its upturned ends between his fingers. “Let me talk to Elisabet,” he said. “If we’re to continue with this, I can’t have her hate me. And I can’t hate her.”
“All right,” Klara said. “You’re welcome to try.” She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the slope of the ceiling, with its water stains in the shape of fish and elephants. “I was terrible to my mother, too,” she said. “It’s foolish to pretend I wasn’t.”
“We’re all terrible to our parents at sixteen.”
“Not you, I’m sure,” she said, her eyelids closing. “You love your parents. You’re a good son.”
“I’m here in Paris while they’re in Konyár.”
“That’s not your fault. Your parents worked so you could go to school, and they wanted you to come here. You write to them every week. They know you love them.”
He hoped she was right. It had been nine months since he’d seen them. Still, he could feel a fine cord stretched between them, a thin luminous fiber that ran from his chest all the way across the continent and forked into theirs. Never before had he lived through a fever without his mother; when he’d been sick in Debrecen she’d taken the train to be with him. Never had he finished a year at school without knowing that soon he’d be home with his father, working beside him in the lumberyard and walking through the fields with him in the evening. Now there was another filament, one that linked him to Klara. And Paris was her home, this place thousands of kilometers from his own. He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the time when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father’s orchard.
For the first time ever, he went to see József Hász at school. The Beaux-Arts was a vast urban palace, a monument to art for art’s sake; it made the humble courtyard and studios of the École Spéciale look like something a few boys had thrown together in an empty lot. He entered through a floriated wrought-iron gate between two stern figures carved in stone, and crossed a sculpture garden packed with perfect marble specimens of kore and kouros, straight from his art history textbook, staring into the distance with empty almond-shaped eyes. He climbed the marble entry stairs of a three-story Romanesque building and found himself in a hallway teeming with young men and women, all of them dressed with careful offhandedness. A list of studio assignments bore József’s name; a map told him where to look. He went upstairs to a classroom with a sloping north-facing ceiling made all of glass. There, among rows of students intent on their paintings, József was applying varnish to a canvas that at first glance seemed to depict three smashed bees lying close to the black abyss of a drain. Upon closer inspection, the bees turned out to be black-haired women in black-striped yellow dresses.
József didn’t seem much surprised to see Andras at his painting studio. He raised a cool eyebrow and continued varnishing. “What are you doing here, Lévi?” he asked. “Don’t you have projects of your own to finish? Are you slacking off for the day? Did you come to make me have a drink in the middle of the morning?”
“I’m looking for that American,” Andras said. “That person who was at your party. Paul.”
“Why? Are you dueling with him over his statuesque girlfriend?” He kicked the easel of the student across from him, and the student gave a shout of protest.
“You imbecile, Hász,” said Paul, for that was who it was. He stepped out from behind the canvas with a paintbrush full of burnt umber, his long equine features tightened with annoyance. “You made me give my maenad a moustache.”
“I’m sure it’ll only improve her.”
“Lévi again,” Paul said, nodding at Andras. “You go to school here?”
“No. I came to talk to you.”
“I think he wants to fight you for that strapping girl,” József said.
“Hász, you’re hilarious,” Paul said. “You should take that act on tour.”
József blew him a kiss and went back to his varnishing.
Paul took Andras’s arm and led him to the studio door. “Sometimes I can stand that jackass and sometimes I can’t,” he said as they descended the stairs. “Today I can’t, particularly.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you at studio,” Andras said. “I didn’t know where else to find you.”
“I hope you’ve come to tell me what’s going on,” Paul said. “I haven’t seen Elisabet for days. I assume her mother’s keeping her at home after that late night we had. But maybe you’ve got more information.” He gave Andras a sideways glance. “I understand you’ve got something going with Madame Morgenstern.”
“Yes,” Andras said. “I suppose you could say we’ve got something going.” They had reached the front doors of the building and sat down outside on the marble steps. Paul searched his pocket for a cigarette and lit it with a monogrammed lighter.
“So?” he said. “What’s the news, then?”
“Elisabet’s been confined to her room,” Andras said. “Her mother won’t let her out until she apologizes to me.”
“For what?”
“Never mind. It’s complicated. The thing is, Elisabet won’t apologize. She’d rather die.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, I’m afraid I’m the one who blew the whistle on the two of you. When Elisabet was out late the other night, her mother was frantic. I had to tell her Elisabet might be with you. Now it’s all out in the open. And her mother didn’t take kindly to the idea of her having a gentleman friend.”
Paul took a long draw of his cigarette and blew a gray cloud into the courtyard. “I’m relieved, to tell you the truth,” he said. “The secrecy was getting a little stifling. I’m wild about the girl, and I hate”—he seemed to search his mind for the French phrase—“sneaking around. I like to be the guy in the white cowboy hat. Do you understand me? Are you a fan of the American western?”
“I’ve seen a few,” Andras said. “Dubbed in Hungarian, though.”
Paul laughed. “I didn’t know they did that.”
“They do.”
“So you’re here on a peace mission? You want to help us, now that you’ve mucked everything up?”
“Something like that. I’d like to act as a go-between. To earn Elisabet’s trust again, if you will. I can’t have her hate me forever. Not if her mother and I are going to keep seeing each other.”
“What’s the plan, then?”
“You can’t pay a visit to Elisabet, but I can. I’m sure she’d want to hear from you. I thought you might want to send a note.”
“What if her mother finds out?”
“I plan to tell her,” Andras said. “I predict she’ll come around to you eventually.”
Paul took a long American drag on his cigarette, seeming to consider the proposition. Then he said, “Listen to me, Lévi. I’m serious about this girl. She’s like no one else I know. I hope this isn’t just going to make things worse.”
“At the moment, I’m not sure they could get much worse.”
Paul stubbed his cigarette against the marble step, then kicked it down into the dirt. “All right,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll go write a note.” He got to his feet and offered Andras a hand up. Andras stood and waited, watching a pair of finches browse for seeds in a clump of lavender. He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him, took out his pocketknife, and cut a sheaf of stems. A length of cotton string torn from the strap of his canvas satchel served to tie them. A few minutes later, Paul came downstairs with a kraft envelope in his hand.
“There’s a note,” Paul said, and handed it to him. “Good luck to us both.”
“Here goes nothing,” Andras said. His sole English phrase.
When he arrived the next day at noon, Klara was teaching a private student. It was Mrs. Apfel who opened the door. Her white apron was stained with purple juice, and she had a pair of bruised-looking moons under her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept in days. She gave Andras a tired frown; she seemed to expect nothing from him but more trouble.
“I’m here to see Elisabet,” Andras said.
Mrs. Apfel shook her head. “You’d better go home.”
“I’d like to speak to her,” he said. “Her mother knows why I’m here.”
“Elisabet won’t see you. She’s locked herself in her room. She won’t come out. Won’t even eat.”
“Let me try,” Andras said. “It’s important.”
She knit her ginger-colored eyebrows. “Believe me, you don’t want to try.”
“Give me a tray for her. I’ll take it in.”
“You won’t have any better luck than the rest of us,” she said, but she turned and led him up the stairs. He followed her into the kitchen, where a fallen blueberry cake stood cooling on an iron rack. He stood over it and breathed its scent as Mrs. Apfel made an omelet for Elisabet. She cut a fat slice of the cake and set it on a plate with a square of butter.
“She hasn’t eaten a thing in two days,” Mrs. Apfel said. “We’re going to have to get the doctor here before long.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Andras said. He took the tray and went down the hall to Elisabet’s room, where he knocked the corner of the tray twice against the closed door. From within, silence.
“Elisabet,” he said. “It’s Andras. I brought your lunch.”
Silence.
He set the tray down in the hall, took Paul’s envelope from his bag, pressed it flat, and slipped it under Elisabet’s door. For a long while he heard nothing. Then a faint scraping, as though she were drawing the note closer. He listened for the rustle of paper. There it was. More silence followed. Finally she opened the door, and he stepped in and set the tray on her little desk. She gave the food a contemptuous glance but wouldn’t look at Andras at all. Her hair was a dun-colored tangle, her face raw and damp. She wore a wrinkled nightgown and red socks with holes in the toes.
“Close the door,” she said.
“How did you get that letter?”
“I went to see Paul. I thought he’d want to know what had happened to you. I thought he might want to send you a note.”
She gave a shuddering sigh and sat down on the bed. “What does it matter?” she said. “My mother’s never going to let me leave the house again. It’s all over with Paul.” When she raised her eyes to him there was a look he’d never seen in them before: grim, exhausted defeat.
Andras shook his head. “Paul doesn’t think it’s all over. He wants to meet your mother.”
Elisabet’s eyes filled with tears. “She’ll never meet him,” she said.
She was exactly Mátyás’s age, Andras thought. She would have cut her teeth when he’d cut his teeth, walked at the same time, learned to write during the same school year. But she was no one’s sister. She had no age-mate in that house, no one she could think of as an ally. She had no one with whom to divide the intensity of her mother’s scrutiny and love.
“He wants to know you’re all right,” Andras said. “If you write back to him, I’ll take the note.”
“Why would you?” she demanded. “I’ve been so hateful to you!” And she put her head against her knees and cried—not from remorse, it seemed to him, but from sheer exhaustion. He sat down in the desk chair beside the bed, looking out the window into the street below, where one set of posters touted the Jardin des Plantes and another set advertised Abel Gance’s J’accuse, which had just opened at the Grand Rex. He would wait as long as she wanted to cry. He sat beside her in silence until she was finished, until she’d wiped her nose on her sleeve and pushed her hair back with a damp hand. Then he asked, as gently as possible, “Don’t you think it’s time to eat something?”
“Not hungry,” she said.
“Yes, you are.” He turned to the tray of food on the desk and spread the butter on the blueberry cake, took the napkin and laid it on Elisabet’s knees, set the tray before her on the bed. A quiet moment passed; from below they could hear the triple-beat lilt of a waltz, and Klara’s voice as she counted out the steps for her private student. Elisabet picked up her fork. She didn’t set it down again until she’d eaten everything on the tray. Afterward she put the tray on the floor and took a piece of notepaper from the desk. While Andras waited, she scribbled something on a page of her school notebook with a blunt pencil. She tore it out, folded it in half, and thrust it into his hand.
“There’s your apology,” she said. “I apologized to you and to my mother, and to Mrs. Apfel for being so awful to her these past few days. You can leave it on my mother’s writing desk in the sitting room.”
“Do you want to send a note to Paul?”
She bit the end of the pencil, tore out a new piece of paper. After a moment she threw a glare at Andras. “I can’t write it while you’re watching me,” she said. “Go wait in the other room until I call you.”
He took the tray and the cleaned plates and brought them to the kitchen, where Mrs. Apfel stared in speechless amazement. He delivered the apology to Klara’s writing table. Finally he went to the bedroom and set the little bunch of lavender in a glass on Klara’s bedside table with a four-word note of his own. Then he went into the sitting room to wait for Elisabet’s note, and to gather his thoughts about what he’d say to Klara.
In August, Monsieur Forestier closed his set design studio for a three-week holiday. Elisabet went to Avignon with Marthe, whose family had a summer home there; they wouldn’t be back until the first of September. Mrs. Apfel went once again to her daughter’s house in Aix. And Klara wrote a note to Andras, telling him to come to the rue de Sévigné with enough clothing for a twelve-day stay.
He packed a bag, his chest tight with joy. The rue de Sévigné, that apartment, those sunlit rooms, the house where he’d lived with Klara in December: Now it would be theirs again for nearly two weeks. He’d longed for that kind of time with her. In the first month after he’d found out about Novak, he had lived in a state of near-constant dread; despite Klara’s reassurances, he could never shake the fear that Novak would call to her and she would go to him. The dread abated as July passed and there was no word from Novak, no sign that Klara would abandon Andras for his sake. At last he began to trust her, and even to envision a future with her, though the details were still obscure. He began to spend Sundays at her house again, and more pleasantly than in the past: His diplomacy with Elisabet had earned him her reluctant gratitude, and she could sit with him for an hour without insulting him or mocking his imperfect French. Though Klara had been furious at first when Andras had told her of his role as go-between, she had nonetheless been impressed with the change he’d brought about in Elisabet. He had made an earnest argument for Paul’s merits, and finally Klara had relented and invited Elisabet’s gentleman friend to lunch. Before long, a delicate peace had emerged; Paul had impressed Klara with his knowledge of contemporary art, his good-natured courtliness, his unfailing patience with Elisabet.
Now another milestone was approaching: the first time Andras would celebrate a birthday in Paris. In late August he would turn twenty-three. As he packed his suitcase he imagined drinking champagne with Klara on the rue de Sévigné, the two of them sweetly alone, a reprise of their winter idyll. But when he arrived at her house that morning there was a black Renault parked at the curb, its top folded down. Two small suitcases stood beside the car; a scarf and goggles lay on the driver’s seat. Klara stepped out of the house, shading her eyes against the sun; she wore a motoring duster, canvas boots, driving gloves. She had gathered her hair into two bunches at the back of her head.
“What’s this all about?” Andras said.
“Put your things in the trunk,” Klara said, throwing him the keys. “We’re going to Nice.”
“To Nice? In this car? We’re driving this car?”
“Yes, in this car.”
He gave a shout, climbed over the car, and took her in his arms. “You can’t have done this,” he said.
“I did. It’s for your birthday. We have a cottage by the sea.”
Though he knew in theory that cars and cottages could be hired, it seemed almost impossible to believe that Klara had in actuality hired a car, and that, having the car in their possession, they could simply fill its tank with gas and drive to a cottage in Nice. No struggling with baggage in a train station, no crowded third-class rail carriage smelling of smoke and sandwiches and sweating passengers, no search for a cab or horse cart at the other end of the line. Just Andras and Klara in this tiny beetle-black car. And then a house where they would be alone together. What luxury; what freedom. They piled their suitcases into the car, and Klara put on her scarf and driving goggles.
“How do you know how to drive?” he asked her as they pulled away toward the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. “Do you know everything?”
“Nearly everything,” she said. “I don’t know Portuguese or Japanese, and I can’t make brioche, and I’m a terrible singer. But I do know how to drive. My father taught me when I was a girl. We used to practice in the country, near my grandmother’s house in Kaba.”
“I hope you’ve driven more recently than that.”
“Not often. Why? Are you afraid?”
“I don’t know,” Andras said. “Should I be?”
“You’ll find out soon!”
From the rue du Pas de la Mule she turned onto the boulevard Beaumarchais and merged effortlessly into the traffic encircling the Bastille. She picked up the boulevard Bourdon; they crossed the Seine at Pont d’Austerlitz and shot off toward the south. Andras’s cap threatened to fly away, and he had to hold it to his head with one hand. They motored through the seemingly endless suburbs of Paris (Who lived in these distant neighborhoods, these balconied three-story buildings? Whose washing was that on the line?) and then out into the gold haze and the rolling green pastures of the countryside. Sturdy sheep and goats stood in bitten-down grass. Beside a farmhouse, children beat at the exoskeleton of a rusted Citroën with sticks and spades. A clutter of chickens crowded into the roadway and Klara had to blast them with a ga-zoo-bah! from the Renault’s horn. Tall feathery lindens whipped by, each with its fleeting rush of sound. For lunch they stopped beside a meadow and ate cold chicken and an asparagas salad and a peach tart that attracted yellowjackets. At Valence a thunderstorm overtook them and threw a hard slant of rain into the car before they could raise the roof; as they drove on, the windshield became so clouded with steam that they had to stop and wait for the storm to pass. It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze. But the air grew cooler with their approach, and the grasses along the road bent their seed pods in a rising wind. They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon. Klara stopped the car at an empty beach and turned off the motor. At the margin of the water, a pounding roar and a cataclysm of foam. Without a word they got out of the car and walked toward that ragged white edge.
Andras cuffed his pants and stepped into the water. When a wave rolled in, the ground slid away beneath his feet and he had to catch Klara’s arm to keep from falling. He knew that feeling, that powerful and frightening tidal pull: It was Klara, her draw upon him, her inevitability in his life. She laughed and went to her knees in the waves, letting them wash over her body and render her blouse transparent; when she stood, her skirt was decorated with seaweed. He wanted to lay her down on the cooling stones and have her right there, but she ran back across the beach toward the car, calling for him to come.
After they’d driven through the town with its white hotels, its glittering curvelet of sea, they turned onto a road so rutted and rocky it threatened to disembowel the Renault. At the top of the road, a crumbling stone cottage stood in a tiny garden surrounded by gorse. The key was in a bird’s nest above the door. They dragged their suitcases inside and fell onto the bed, too exhausted now to consider lovemaking or dinner preparations or anything besides sleep. When they awoke it was velvet dark. They fumbled for kerosene lanterns, ate the cheese and bread that had been intended for breakfast the next morning. A slow-moving fog obscured the stars. Klara had forgotten her nightgown. Andras discovered that he was allergic to some plant in the garden; his eyes burned, and he sneezed and sneezed. They spent a restless night listening to the door rattling against its jamb, the wind soughing between the window frame and the sill, the endless gripe and creak of nighttime insects. When Andras woke in the gray haze of early morning, his first thought was that they could simply get into the car and return to Paris if they wanted. But here was Klara beside him, a scattering of sand grains in the fine hair at her temple; they were at Nice and he had seen the Mediterranean. He went outside to shoot a long arc of asparagus-scented urine out over the back garden. Inside again, he curled against Klara and fell into his deepest sleep of the night, and when he awoke for the second time there was a block of hot sunlight in bed with him where she had been. God, he was hungry; he felt as if he hadn’t eaten in days. From outside he heard the snick of gardening shears. Without bothering to don a shirt or trousers or even a pair of undershorts, he went out to find Klara removing a cluster of tall flowers that looked like close-crocheted doilies.
“Wild carrot,” she said. “That’s what made you sneeze last night.” She was wearing a sleeveless red cotton dress and a straw hat; her arms glowed gold in the sunlight. She wiped her brow with a handkerchief and stood to look at Andras in the doorway. “Au naturel,” she observed.
Andras made a fig leaf of his hand.
“I think I’m finished gardening,” she said, and smiled.
He went back to the bed, which lay in a windowed alcove from which he could see a slice of Mediterranean. Eons passed before she came in and washed her hands. He had forgotten how hungry he’d been when he first awakened. He had forgotten everything else in the world. She removed her shoes and climbed onto the bed, leaning over him. Her dark hair burned with absorbed sunlight, and her breath was sweet: She’d been eating strawberries in the garden. The red veil of her dress fell over his eyes.
Outside, three pygmy goats stepped out of the gorse and ate all the clipped flowers and a good many half-grown lettuces and an empty cardboard matchbook and Klara’s forgotten handkerchief. They liked to visit this cottage; intriguing and unfamiliar things often appeared in the yard. As they sniffed the tires of the Renault, a burst of human noise from the cottage made them raise their ears: two voices calling out and calling out inside the house.
Far below the cottage, silent from that high vantage point, lay the town of Nice with its blinding white beaches. In Nice you could swim in the rolling sea. You could eat at a café by the beach. You could sleep in a rented lounge chair on the pebbled strand or stroll through the colonnade of a hotel. For five francs you could watch a film projected onto the blank wall of a warehouse. You could buy armloads of roses and carnations at a covered flower market. You could tour the ruins of Roman baths at Cemenelum and eat a picnic lunch on a hill overlooking the port. You could buy art supplies for half what they cost in Paris. Andras bought a sketchbook and twelve good pencils with leads of varying density. In the afternoons, while Klara practiced ballet, he practiced drawing. First he drew their cottage until he knew every stone and every roof angle. Then he razed the cottage in his mind and began to plan the house they could build on that land. The land had a gentle slope; the house would have two stories, one of them invisible from the front. Its roofline would lie close to the hillside and be covered with sod; they would grow lavender thick and sweet in that layer of earth. He would build the house of rough-cut limestone. He would abandon the hard geometry of his professors’ designs and allow the house to lie against the hillside like a shoulder of rock revealed by wind. On the sea-facing side, he would set sliding glass doors into the limestone. There would be a practice room for Klara. There would be a studio for himself. There would be sitting rooms and guest rooms, rooms for the children they might have. There would be a stone-paved area behind the house, large enough for a dining table and chairs. There would be a terraced garden where they would grow cucumbers and tomatoes and herbs, squashes and melons; there would be a pergola for grapes. He didn’t dare to guess how much it might cost to buy a piece of land like that or to build the house he’d designed, or whether the building council of Nice would let him do it. The house didn’t exist in a reality that included money or seaside zoning laws. It was a perfect phantom that became more clearly visible the longer they stayed. By day, as he walked the scrubby perimeter of the garden, he laid out those sea-lit rooms; by night, lying awake at Klara’s side, he paved the patio and terraced the hillside for the garden. But he didn’t show his drawings to Klara, or tell her what he was doing while she practiced. Something about the project made him cautious, self-protective; perhaps it was the vast gulf between the harmonious permanence the house suggested and the complicated uncertainty of their lives.
At the stone cottage they lived for the first time like husband and wife. Klara bought food in the village and they cooked together; Andras spoke to her about his plans for the next year, how he might work as an intern at the architecture firm that employed Pierre Vago. She told him of her own plans to hire an assistant teacher from the ranks of young dancers from abroad. She wanted to do for someone what Novak and Forestier had done for Andras. They talked as they dawdled along the road that led to town; they talked after sunset in the dark garden, sitting on wooden chairs they’d dragged out of the house. They bathed each other in a tin tub in the middle of the cottage floor. They set out vegetables and bread for the pygmy goats, and one of the goats gave them milk. They discussed the names of their children: the girl would be Adèle, the boy Tamás. They swam in the sea and ate lemon ices and made love. And on the flat dirt roads that ran along the beaches, Klara taught Andras to drive.
On his first day out he stalled and stalled the Renault until he was blind with rage. He jumped out of the car and accused Klara of teaching him improperly, of trying to make an ass of him. Without surrendering her own calm, she climbed into the driver’s seat, gave him a wink, and drove off, leaving him fuming in the dust. By the time he’d walked the two miles back to the cottage, he was sunburned and contrite. The next day he stalled only twice; the day after that he drove without a stall. They followed the hillside road down to the Promenade des Anglais and drove along the sea all the way to Cannes. He loved the press of the curves, loved the vision of Klara with her white scarf flying. On their way back he drove more slowly, and they watched the sailboats drifting over the water like kites. He navigated the tricky hill up to the cottage without a stall. When they reached the garden, Klara got out and cheered. That night, the eve of his birthday, he drove her into town for drinks at the Hôtel Taureau d’Or. She wore a sea-green dress that revealed her shoulders, and a glittering hairpin in the shape of a starfish. Her skin had deepened to a dusky gold on the beach. Most beautiful of all were her feet in their Spanish sandals, her toes revealed in their shy brown beauty, her nails like chips of pink nacre. On the deck of the Taureau d’Or he told her he loved seeing her feet bare in public.
“It’s so risqué,” he said. “You seem thrillingly naked.”
She gave him a sad smile. “You should have seen them when I was en pointe every day. They were atrocious. You can’t imagine what ballet does to the feet.” She turned her glass in careful rings on the wooden table. “I wouldn’t have worn sandals for a million pengő.”
“I would have paid two million to see you wear them.”
“You didn’t have two million. You were a schoolboy at the time.”
“I’d have found a way to earn it.”
She laughed and slipped a finger under the cuff of his shirt, smoothed the skin of his wrist. It was torture to be beside her all day like this. The more he had of her, the more he wanted. Worst of all were the times on the beach, where she wore a black maillot and a bathing cap with white racing stripes. She’d turn over on her rattan beach mat and there would be silvery grains of sand dusting her breasts, the soft rise of her pubis, the smooth skin of her thighs. He had spent most of their time on the beach shielding his erection from public view with the aid of a book or towel. The previous afternoon he’d watched her execute neat dives from a wooden tower at this very beach; he could see the tower now, ghostly in the moonlight, a skeleton standing in the sea.
“I think we ought to stay here always,” he said. “You can teach ballet in Nice. I can finish my studies by correspondence.”
A veil of melancholy seemed to fall over her features. She took a sip of her drink. “You’re turning twenty-three,” she said. “That means I’ll be thirty-two soon. Thirty-two. The more I think about it, the more it begins to seem like an old woman’s age.”
“That’s nonsense,” Andras said. “The last Hungarian women’s swimming champion was thirty-three when she won her gold medal in Munich. My mother was thirty-five when Mátyás was born.”
“I feel as if I’ve lived such a long time already,” she said. “Those days when I wouldn’t have worn sandals for a million pengő—” She paused and smiled, but her eyes were sad and faraway. “So many years ago! Seventeen years!”
This wasn’t about him, he understood. It was about her own life, about how everything had changed when she’d become pregnant with her daughter. That was what had caused the veil to fall. When the waiter came she ordered absinthe for both of them, a drink she chose only when she was sad and wanted to be lifted away from the world.
But absinthe didn’t have the same effect on him; it tended to play dirty tricks on his mind. He told himself it might be different here at Nice, at this dreamlike hotel bar overlooking the beach, but it wasn’t long before the wormwood began to do its poisonous work. A gate swung open and paranoia elbowed through. If Klara was melancholy now, it wasn’t because she’d lost her life in ballet; it was because she’d lost Elisabet’s father. Her one great love. The single monumental secret she’d never told him. Her feelings for Andras were chaff by comparison. Even her eleven-year relationship with Novak hadn’t been able to break the spell. Madame Gérard knew it; Elisabet herself knew it; even Tibor had guessed it in the space of an hour, while Andras had failed to recognize it for months and months. How absurd of him to have spent the summer worrying about Novak when the real threat was this phantom, the only man who would ever have Klara’s heart. The fact that she could sit here in a sea-green dress and those sandals, calmly drinking absinthe, pretending she might someday be Andras’s wife, and then allow herself to be pulled back to wherever she’d been pulled—by him, no doubt, that nameless faceless man she’d loved—made him want to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she cried.
“God, Andras,” she said finally. “Don’t look at me that way.”
“You look as if you want to kill me.”
Her limpid gray eyes. The glitter of the starfish in her hair. Her child-sized hands on the table. He was more afraid of her, of what she could do to him, than anyone he’d known in his life. He pushed back his chair and went to the bar, where he bought a pack of Gauloises, and then walked down to the beach. There was some comfort in picking up shells at the water’s edge and skipping them into the surf. He sat down on the wooden slats of a deck chair and smoked three cigarettes, one after the other. He thought he might like to sleep on the beach that night, with the waves pounding the shore in the dark and the sound of the hotel band drifting down from the plein air ballroom. But soon his head began to clear and he realized he’d left Klara sitting alone at their table. The absinthe gate was closing. His paranoia retreated. He looked back over his shoulder, and there was the sea-green brushmark of Klara’s dress disappearing into the saffron light of the hotel.
He raced up the beach to catch her, but by the time he got there she was nowhere to be seen. In the lobby, the desk clerk denied having seen a woman in green walk past; the doormen had seen her leave, but one of them thought she’d headed away from town and another thought she’d headed toward it. The car was still parked where they’d left it, at the outside corner of a dusty lot. It was quite dark now. He thought she wouldn’t walk toward town, not in her current mood. He got into the car and drove at a crawl along the beach road. He hadn’t gotten far before his headlights illuminated a sea-green flash against the roadside. She was walking swiftly, her sandals raising clouds of dust. She’d wrapped her arms around herself; he could see the familiar sweet column of her vertebrae rising out of the deep-cut back of her dress. He brought the car to a stop and jumped out to catch up with her. She gave him a swift glance over her shoulder and kept walking.
“Klara,” he said. “Klárika.”
She stopped finally, her arms limp at her sides. From around a curve in the road came a sweep of headlights; they splashed across her body as a roadster tore past and shot off toward the center of town, its passengers shouting a song into the night. When it had gone, there was nothing but the thrum and pound of waves. For a long time neither of them spoke. She wouldn’t turn to face him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I left you sitting there.”
“Let’s just go home,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about this on the side of the road.”
“Don’t be angry.”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought up the past. It makes me miserable to think of it, and that must have been what made you get up and go down to the beach.”
“It was the absinthe,” he said. “It makes me crazy.”
“It wasn’t the absinthe,” she said.
“Klara, please.”
“I’m cold,” she said, and put her arms around herself. “I want to get back to the house.”
He drove them, feeling no satisfaction in his mastery of the road; when they got out of the car there was no celebration of his skill. Klara went into the yard and sat down in one of the wooden chairs they’d dragged outside. He sat down beside her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did a foolish thing, a selfish thing, leaving you there at the table.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She’d retreated to some distant place of her own, too small to admit him. “It’s been little more than torture for you, hasn’t it?” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“All of it. Our connection. My half-truths. Everything I haven’t told you.”
“Don’t speak in those maddening generalizations,” he said. “What half-truths? Do you mean what happened with Novak? I thought we’d moved past that, Klara. What else do you want to tell me?”
She shook her head. Then she put her hand to her eyes and her shoulders began to shake.
“What’s happened to you?” he said. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t make this happen by walking down to the beach for a smoke.”
“No,” she said, looking up, her eyes lit with tears. “It’s just that I understood something while you were down there.”
“What is it?” he said. “If it has a name, tell me.”
“I ruin things,” she said. “I’m a ruiner. I take what’s good and make it bad. I take what’s bad and make it worse. I did it to my daughter and to Zoltán, and now I’ve done it to you. I saw how unhappy you looked before you left the table.”
“Ah, I see. It’s all your fault. You forced Elisabet to have the problems she’s had. You forced Novak to deceive his wife. You forced me to fall in love with you. The three of us had no part in it at all.”
“You don’t know the half of what I’ve done.”
“Then tell me! What is it? Tell me.”
She shook her head.
“And if you don’t?” he said. He got to his feet and took her by the arm, pulled her up beside him. “How are we supposed to go on? Will you keep me in ignorance? Will I learn the truth someday from your daughter?”
“No,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. “Elisabet doesn’t know.”
“If we’re to be together, I have to know everything. You’ve got to decide, Klara. If you want this to continue, you’ll have to be honest with me.”
“You’re hurting my arm,” she said.
“Who was he? Just tell me his name.”
“Who?”
“That man you loved. Elisabet’s father.”
She yanked her arm away. In the moonlight he could see the fabric of her dress straining against her ribs and going smooth again. Her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t ever grab me like that,” she said, and began to sob. “I want to go home. Please, Andras. I’m sorry. I want to go home to Paris.” She put her arms around herself, shivering as though she’d caught a fever in the cool Mediterranean night. Her starfish pin glittered like a beautiful mistake, a festive scrap torn from an ocean-liner ball, blown across the sea and caught by chance in the dark waves of her hair.
He could see it: She’d been overtaken by something that was like a disease, something that shook her frame and brought a pallor to her skin. He saw it in the way she huddled beneath the blankets in the cottage, the way she stared flat-eyed at the wall. She was serious about going home; she wanted to leave in the morning. For an hour he lay in bed with her, wide awake, until he heard her breath slide into the rhythm of sleep. He didn’t have the heart to be angry at her anymore. If she wanted to go home, he’d take her home. He could gather their things that night and be ready to leave at dawn. Careful not to wake her, he crawled out of bed and began to pack their suitcases. It was good to have something concrete and finite to do. He folded her little things: the cotton dresses, her stockings, her underclothes, her black maillot; he replaced her necklaces and earrings in the satin envelope from which he’d seen her remove them. He tucked her ballet shoes into each other and folded her practice skirts and leotards. Afterward, he put on a jacket and sat alone in the garden. In the weeds beside the driveway, crickets sang a French tune; the song his crickets sang in Konyár had had different high notes, a different rhythm. But the stars overhead were the same. There was the damsel stretched on her rock, and the little bear, and the dragon. He had pointed them out to Klara a few nights earlier; she’d made him repeat them each night until she knew them as well as he did.
They drove back to Paris the next morning. He had helped her get up and dress in the blue morning light; she had wept when she saw he’d packed all their things. “I’ve ruined this holiday for you,” she said. “And today’s your birthday.”
“I don’t care about that,” he said. “Let’s get home. It’s a long drive.”
While she waited in the car he locked the cottage and restored the key to the bird’s nest above the door. For the last time he drove down the winding road toward Nice; the sea glittered as sun began to spill across its pailletted surface. He wasn’t frightened on the road, not after the lessons she’d given him. He drove toward Paris as she sat silently and watched the fields and farms. By the time they’d reached the tangle of streets outside the city, she’d fallen asleep and he had to try to remember how they’d come. The streets had their own ideas; he lost an hour trying to find his way through the suburbs before a policeman directed him to the Porte d’Italie. At last he found his way across the Seine and up the familiar boulevards to the rue de Sévigné. By that time the sun was low in the sky; the dance studio lay in shadow, and the stairs were dark. Klara woke and rubbed her face with her hands. He helped her upstairs and got her into the nightgown she’d forgotten on the bed. She lay on her back and let the tears roll down her temples and onto the pillow.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, sitting beside her. “What do you need?”
“Just to be alone,” she said. “Just to sleep for a while.”
Her tone was strangely flat. This pale woman in the embroidered gown was the ghostly sister of the Klara he knew, the woman who’d raced from her house a week earlier in a duster and driving goggles. It seemed impossible to go home. He didn’t intend to leave her in this fog. Instead he carried her things upstairs from the car, then made her a cup of the linden tea she drank when she had a headache. When he brought it in, she sat up in bed and extended a hand to him. He came to the bed and sat down beside her. She held his eyes with her eyes; a pink flush had spread across her chest. She laid her head on his shoulder and put her arms around his waist. He felt the rise and fall of her chest against his own.
“What a dreadful birthday you’ve had,” she said.
“Not at all,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’ve been with you all day.”
“There’s something for you in the dance studio,” she said. “A birthday present.”
“I don’t need a present,” he said.
“Nonetheless.”
“You can give it to me another time.”
“No,” she said. “You should have it on your birthday, as long as we’re back anyway. I’ll come down with you.” She got out of bed and took his hand. Together they went down the stairs and into the dance studio. Standing against one wall was a sheet-draped object the size and shape of an upright piano.
“My God,” he said. “What is it?”
“Take a look,” she said.
“I don’t know if I dare.”
“Dare.”
He lifted the sheet by the corner and tugged it free. There, with its polished wooden drawing surface tilted toward the window, its steel base engraved with the name of a famous cabinetmaker, was a handmade drafting table as handsome and professional as Pierre Vago’s. At the bottom of the drawing surface was a perfect groove for pencils; on the right side, a deep inkwell. A drafting stool stood beneath the table, its seat and brass wheels gleaming. His throat closed.
“You don’t like it,” she said.
He waited until he knew he could speak. “It’s too good,” he said. “It’s an architect’s table. Not something for a student.”
“You’ll still have it when you’re an architect. But I wanted you to have it now.”
“Keep it for me,” he said. He turned to her and put a hand against her cheek. “If you decide we’re going to be together, I’ll take it home.”
The color faded from her lips and she closed her eyes. “Please,” she said. “I want you to take it now. It comes apart in two pieces. Take it in the car.”
“I can’t,” he said. “Not now.”
“Please, Andras.”
“Keep it for me. Once you’ve had some time to think, you’ll let me know if I should take it or not. But I won’t take it as a memento of you. Do you understand? I won’t have it instead of you.”
She nodded, her gray eyes downcast.
“It’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten in my life,” he said.
And their holiday was at an end. September was coming. He could feel it as he walked home along the Pont Marie, carrying his bag with twelve days’ worth of clothes. September was sending its first cool streamers into Paris, its red tinge of burning. The scent of it blew through the channel of the Seine like the perfume of a girl on the threshold of a party. Her foot in its satin shoe had not yet crossed the sill, but everyone knew she was there. In another moment she would enter. All of Paris seemed to hold its breath, waiting.