THE NEWS CAME to Andras at studio. Though he was half blind with exhaustion after his night with Klara, he had to go to school; he had a critique that day. It was an emulation project: he’d had to design a single-use space in the style of a contemporary architect. He had designed an architecture studio after Pierre Charreau, modeling it upon the doctor’s house on the rue Saint-Guillaume: a three-level building composed of glass block and steel, flooded with diffuse light all day and glowing from inside at night. Everyone had arrived early to pin their designs to the walls; once Andras had found a place for his drawings, he took a stool from his worktable and sat with the older students around a paint-spattered radio. They were listening to the news, expecting nothing but the usual panchromium of worries.
It was Rosen who caught it first; he turned up the volume so everyone could hear. The German ambassador had just been shot. No, not the ambassador, an embassy official. A secretary of legation, whatever that was. Ernst Eduard vom Rath. Twenty-nine years old. He’d been shot by a child. A child? That couldn’t be right. A youngster. A boy of seventeen. A Jewish boy. A German-Jewish boy of Polish extraction. He had shot the official to avenge the deportation of twelve thousand Jews from Germany.
“Oh, God,” Ben Yakov said, pulling his hands through his pomaded hair. “He’s a dead man.”
Everyone crowded closer. Had the embassy official been killed, or was he still alive? The answer came a moment later: He had been shot four times in the abdomen; he was undergoing surgery at the Alma Clinic on rue de l’Université, not ten minutes from the École Spéciale. It was rumored that Hitler was sending his personal physician from Berlin, along with the director of the Surgical Clinic of the University of Munich. The assailant, Gruenspan or Grinspun, was being held at an undisclosed location.
“Sending his personal physician!” Rosen said. “I’m sure he is. Sending him with a nice big capsule of arsenic for their man.”
“What do you mean?” someone demanded.
“Vom Rath has to die for Germany,” Rosen said. “Once he does, they can do whatever they want to the Jews.”
“They’d never kill their own man.”
“Of course they would.”
“They won’t have to,” another student said. “The man’s been shot four times.”
Polaner had stepped away from the crowd near the radio and had gone to smoke a cigarette by the window. Andras went over and looked down into the courtyard, where two fifth-year students were hanging a complicated wooden mobile from a tree. Polaner cracked the window open and blew a line of smoke out into the chilly air.
“I knew him,” he said. “Not the Jewish boy. The other.”
“Vom Rath?” Andras said. “How?”
Polaner glanced up at Andras and then looked away. He tapped his ash onto the windowsill outside, where it circled for a moment and then scattered. “There’s a certain bar I used to go to,” Polaner said. “He used to go, too.”
Andras nodded in silence.
“Shot,” Polaner said. “By a seventeen-year-old Jewish kid. Vom Rath, of all people.”
Vago came in at that moment and turned off the radio, and everyone began to take their seats for the brief lecture he’d give before the critique. Andras sat on his wooden stool only half listening, scratching a box into the surface of the studio desk with the metal clip of his pencil. It was all too much, what Klara had told him the night before and what had happened at the German Embassy. In his mind they became one: Klara and the Polish-German teenager, both violated, both holding guns in trembling hands, both firing, both condemned. Nazi doctors hastened toward Paris to save or kill a man. And the Polish-German boy was in jail somewhere, waiting to learn if he was a murderer or not. Andras’s drawing had slipped one of its pins and hung askew from the wall. He looked at it and thought, That’s right. At that moment, everything seemed to hang at an angle by a single pin: not just houses, but whole cities, countries, peoples. He wished he could quiet the din in his mind. He wanted to be in the smooth white bed at Klara’s house, in her white bedroom, in the sheets that smelled like her body. But there was Vago now, taking Andras’s drawing by its corner and repinning it to the wall. There was the class gathering around. It was time for his critique. He made himself get up from the table and stand beside his drawing while they discussed it. It was only afterward, when everyone was patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand, that he realized it had been a success.
“Vom Rath didn’t hate the Jews,” Polaner said. “He was a Party member, of course, but he loathed what was going on in Germany. That’s why he came to France: He wanted to get away. At least that was what he told me.”
Two days had passed; Ernst vom Rath had died that afternoon at the Alma Clinic. Hitler’s doctors had come, but they had deferred to the French doctors. According to the evening news broadcast, vom Rath had died of complications from damage to his spleen. A ceremony would be held at the German Lutheran Church that Saturday.
Andras and Polaner had gone to the Blue Dove for a glass of whiskey, but they’d discovered they were short on cash. It was the end of the month; not even the pooled contents of their pockets would buy a single drink. So they told the waiter they would order in a few minutes, and then they sat talking, hoping they could pass half an hour in that warm room before they’d be asked to leave. After a while the waiter brought their usual whiskey and water. When they protested that they couldn’t pay, the waiter twisted one end of his moustache and said, “Next time I’ll charge you double.”
“How did you meet him?” Andras asked Polaner.
Polaner shrugged. “Someone introduced us. He bought me a drink. We talked. He was intelligent and well read. I liked him.”
“But when you learned who he was—”
“What would you have had me do?” Polaner said. “Walk away? Would you have wanted him to do the same to me?”
“But how could you sit there and speak to a Nazi? Especially after what happened last winter?”
“He didn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t have done it. I told you.”
“That’s what he said, at least. But he may have had other motives.”
“For God’s sake,” Polaner said. “Can’t you leave it alone? A man I knew just died. I’m trying to take it in. Isn’t that enough for now?”
“I’m sorry,” Andras said.
Polaner laid his folded hands on the table and rested his chin upon them. “Ben Yakov was right,” he said. “They’ll make an example of that boy. Grynszpan. They’ll have him extradited and then kill him in some spectacular way.”
“They can’t. The world is watching them.”
“All the better, as far as they’re concerned.”
Klara stood at the window with the newspaper in her hand, looking down into the rue de Sévigné. She had just read aloud a brief article about the actions the German government would take against the Jewish people in recompense for the catastrophic destruction of German property that resulted from the violence of 9 November. The newspapers were calling it the Night of Broken Glass. Andras walked up and down the length of the room, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. At the writing desk Elisabet opened a school notebook and scratched a series of figures with a pencil.
“A billion reichsmarks,” she said. “That’s the amount of the fine against the Jews. And there are half a million Jews in Germany. That means each person has to pay two thousand reichsmarks, including children.”
The logic was astounding. He had tried and failed to grasp it. Grynszpan had shot vom Rath; vom Rath had died; November 9, the Night of Broken Glass, was supposed to have been the German people’s natural reaction to the killing. Therefore the responsibility for the destruction of Jewish shops, and the burning of synagogues, and the ransacking of homes—to say nothing of the killing of ninety-one Jews and the arrest of thirty thousand more—lay with the Jews themselves, and so the Jews had to pay. In addition to the fines, all insurance payments for damaged property would go directly to the government. And now it was illegal for Jews to operate businesses in Germany. In Paris and New York and London there had been protests against the pogrom and its aftermath, but the French government had been strangely silent. Rosen said it was because von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, was supposed to visit Paris in December to sign a declaration of friendship between Germany and France. It all seemed a great ugly sham.
From downstairs came the flutter and clang of the afternoon mail arriving through the slot. Elisabet got to her feet so quickly she overturned the chair, sending it backward into the fire screen, then ran downstairs to get the letters.
“I used to have to bribe her with gingerbread to get the mail,” Klara said as she righted the desk chair. “Now she won’t let it sit for half a minute.”
Elisabet was a long time coming up again. When she reappeared, breathless and flushed, it was only to throw a few envelopes onto the writing desk before she ran off down the hall to her room. Klara sat at the desk and thumbed through the mail. One piece, a thin cream-colored envelope, seemed to catch her attention. She took her letter knife and opened it.
“It’s from Zoltán,” she said, and scanned the single page. Her eyebrows drew together and she read more closely. “He and Edith are leaving in three weeks. He’s writing to say goodbye.”
“Leaving for where?”
“Budapest,” she said. “This isn’t the first I’ve heard of it. Marcelle said she’d heard a rumor that they were leaving—she told me last week when I met her at the Tuileries. Zoltán’s been asked to manage the Royal Hungarian Opera. And Madame Novak wants to raise their child near her family.” She rolled her lips inward and pressed a hand against her mouth.
“Are you so unhappy to see him go, Klara?”
She shook her head. “Not for the reason you’re thinking. You know how I feel about Zoltán. He’s a dear friend to me, an old friend. And a good man. He employed you, after all, when the Bernhardt could scarcely afford it.” She went to sit beside Andras on the sofa and took his hand in her own. “But I’m not unhappy to see him go. I’m glad for him.”
“What’s the matter, then?”
“I’m envious,” she said. “Terribly so. He and Edith can get on a train and go home. They can take the baby home to Edith’s mother, to raise it with its cousins.” She smoothed her gray skirt over her knees. “That pogrom in Germany,” she said. “What if such a thing were to happen in Hungary? What if they were to arrest my brother? What would become of my mother?”
“If anything were to happen in Hungary, I could go to Budapest and see about your mother.”
“But I couldn’t go with you.”
“Perhaps we could find a way to bring your mother to France.”
“Even if we could, it would only be a temporary solution,” she said. “To our larger problem, I mean.”
“What larger problem?”
“You know the one. The problem of where we might live together. In the longer term, I mean. You know I can’t go home to Hungary, and you can’t stay here.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Your family,” she said. “What if there’s a war? You’d want to go home to them. I’ve thought about it a hundred times. You must know I thought about it a great deal in September. It was one of the reasons I couldn’t bring myself to write to you. I couldn’t see a way around it. I knew that if we decided to be together, I’d be keeping you from your family.”
“If I stay here it’ll be my own decision,” Andras said. “But if I have to go, I’ll find a way to bring you with me. We’ll see a lawyer. Isn’t there some statute of limitations?”
She shook her head. “I can still be arrested and tried for what I did. And even if I could go home, I couldn’t leave Elisabet.”
“Of course not,” Andras said. “But Elisabet has plans of her own.”
“Yes, that’s just what I fear. She’s still a child, Andras. She wears that engagement ring, but she doesn’t really understand what it means.”
“Her fiancé seems utterly sincere. I know he has the best intentions.”
“If that were the case, he might have consulted his parents before he started filling her head with ideas about marriage and America! He still hasn’t told them he’s engaged. Apparently they’ve got a girl in mind for him already, some beer heiress from Wisconsin. He’s got no attachment to her, he says, but I’m not certain his parents will see it that way. At the very least, he might have thought to ask my permission before he gave Elisabet that ring.”
Andras smiled. “Is that how it’s done? Do young men still ask permission?”
She surrendered a smile in return. “Good young men,” she said.
And then he drew closer and bent to her ear. “I’d like to ask someone’s permission, Klara,” he said. “I’d like to write a letter to your mother.”
“And what if she says no?” she whispered back.
“Then we’d have to elope.”
“But to where, darling?”
“I don’t care,” he said, looking deep into the gray landscape of her eyes. “I want to be with you. That’s all. I know it’s impractical.”
“It’s entirely impractical,” she said. But she put her arms around his neck and raised her face to him, and he kissed her closed eyes, tasting a trace of salt. At that moment they heard Elisabet’s step in the hallway; she appeared in the doorway of the sitting room in her green wool hat and coat. Andras and Klara drew away from each other and got to their feet.
“Pardon me, disgusting adults,” Elisabet said. “I’m going to the movies.”
“Listen, Elisabet,” Andras said. “What if I were to marry your mother?”
“Please,” Klara said, raising a hand in caution. “This isn’t the way we should talk about it.”
Elisabet tilted her head at Andras. “What did you say?”
“Marry her,” Andras said. “Make her my wife.”
“Do you mean that?” Elisabet said. “You want to marry her?”
“I do.”
“And she’ll have you?”
A long moment passed during which Andras experienced terrible suspense. But then Klara took his hand in her own and pressed it, almost as though she were in pain. “He knows what I want,” she said. “We want the same thing.”
Andras let out a breath. A flash flood of relief washed over Elisabet’s features; her perpetually knotted forehead went smooth. She crossed the room and put her arms around Andras, then kissed her mother. “It’s splendid,” she said, with plain sincerity. Without another word she flung her purse over her shoulder and clattered down the stairs.
“Splendid?” Klara said, in the reverberating silence that always followed Elisabet’s departures. “I’m not certain what I was expecting, but that wasn’t it.”
“She thinks it’ll make things easier for her and Paul.”
Klara sighed. “I know. If I marry you, she won’t have to feel guilty about leaving me.”
“We’ll wait, then, if you think it’ll make a difference. We’ll wait until she’s finished with school.”
“That’s another seven months.”
“Seven months,” he said. “But then we’ll have the rest of our lives.”
She nodded and took his hand. “Seven months.”
“Klara,” he said. “Klara Morgenstern. Have you just agreed to marry me?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. When Elisabet’s done with school. But that doesn’t mean I’m letting her run off to America with that smooth-talking young man.”
“Seven months,” he said.
“And perhaps by then we’ll solve our geographic problem.”
He held her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyelids. “Let’s not worry about that now,” he said. “Promise me you won’t think about it.”
“I can’t promise that, Andras. We’ll have to think about it if we’re to solve it.”
“We’ll think about it later. Now I want to kiss you. May I?”
In answer she put her arms around him, and he kissed her, wishing he had nothing else to do all day, all year, all his life. Then he pulled away and said, “I’m unprepared for this. I don’t have anything for you. I don’t have a ring.”
“A ring!” she said. “I don’t want a ring.”
“You’ll have one, though. I’ll see to it. And I wasn’t speaking lightly when I said I wanted to write to your mother.”
“That’s a tricky business, as you know.”
“I wish we could speak to József,” Andras said. “He could write to her, or enclose a letter from me inside one of his own.”
Klara pulled her lips together. “From what you’ve told me about his life, it hasn’t come to seem any wiser to involve him in our situation.”
“If we’re to be married, he’ll have to know sometime. The Latin Quarter is a small place.”
She sighed. “I know. It’s rather complicated.” She went back to the sofa and opened the folded newspaper. “At least we’ve got some time to think about it. Seven months,” she said. “Who knows what will happen by then? Shouldn’t we all just get married at once? Shouldn’t I be glad that my child might go across the ocean to America? If there’s a war, she’ll be safer there.”
That elusive ghost, safety. It had fled Hungary, had fled the halls of the École Spéciale, had fled Germany long before November 9. But as he sat down beside her and looked at the newspaper on her lap, he tasted the shock of it all over again. He followed the line of her hand to the front-page photograph: a man and woman in their nightclothes, standing in the street; a little boy between them, clutching what looked to be a Punch doll with a cone-shaped hat; and before them, shedding its violent light on them, a house on fire from its doorstep to its rafters. In the places where the fire had burned away carpets and flooring, wallpaper and plaster, he could see the structure of the house illuminated like the stripped bones of an animal. And he saw what an architect might see, what the man and woman and boy could not have seen as they stood in the street at that moment: that the main supports had already burned through, and in another moment the structure would fall in upon itself like a poorly built model, its beams crumbling to ash.