“You ought to open that box. I’m sure your mother sent you something nice for dinner.”
“That box! I forgot all about it.” He brought it from across the room and pried open the top with a butter knife. Inside were a tin of almond cookies; a tin of rugelach; a tin into which an entire Linzer torte had been packed without a millimeter to spare; a supply of woolen underclothes for the coming winter; a box of stationery with the envelopes already addressed to his parents; a list of cousins upon whom he was supposed to call; a list of things he was supposed to procure for his mother, including certain intimate ladies’ garments; a new opera glass; and a pair of shoes made for him by his shoemaker on Váci utca, whose talents, he said, were unparalleled by those of any cobbler in Paris.
“My brother works at a shoe store on Váci utca,” Andras said, and mentioned the name of the shop.
“Not the same one, I’m afraid,” József said, a hint of condescension in his tone. He cut a slice of the Linzer torte, ate it, and pronounced it perfect. “You’re a good man, Lévi, dragging this cake across Europe. How can I repay the favor?”
“You might tell me how to set up a life here,” Andras said.
“Are you sure you want to take instruction from me?” József said. “I’m a wastrel and a libertine.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got no choice,” Andras said. “You’re the only person I know in Paris.”
“Ah! Lucky you, then,” József said. As they ate slices of Linzer torte from the tin, he recommended a Jewish boardinghouse and an art-supply store and a student dining club where Andras might get cheap meals. He didn’t dine there himself, of course-generally he had his meals sent up from a restaurant on the boulevard Saint-Germain-but he had friends who did, and found it tolerable. As for the fact that Andras was enrolled at the École Spéciale and not the Beaux-Arts, it was regrettable that they wouldn’t be schoolmates but probably just as well for Andras; József was a notoriously bad influence. And now that they had solved the problem of setting up Andras’s life in Paris, didn’t he want to come out to the balcony to have a smoke and look at his new city?
Andras allowed József to lead him through the bedroom and through the high French doors. The day was cold, and the previous night’s fog had settled into a fine drizzle; the sun was a silver coin behind a scrim of cloud.
“Here you are,” József said. “The most beautiful city on earth. That dome is the Panthéon, and over there is the Sorbonne. To the left is St.-Etienne-du-Mont, and if you lean this way you can see a sliver of Notre-Dame.”
Andras rested his hands on the railing and looked out over an expanse of unfamiliar gray buildings beneath a cold curtain of mist. Chimneys crowded the rooftops like strange alien birds, and the green haze of a park hovered beyond a battalion of zinc mansards. Far off to the west, blurred by distance, the Tour Eiffel melted upward into the sky. Between himself and that landmark lay thousands of unknown streets and shops and human beings, filling a distance so vast as to make the tower look wiry and fragile against the slate-gray clouds.
“Well?” József said.
“There’s a lot of it, isn’t there?”
“Enough to keep a man busy. In fact, I’ve got to be off again in a few minutes. I’ve got a lunch appointment with a certain Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia.” He winked and straightened his tie.
“Ah. You mean the girl in sequins from last night?”
“I’m afraid not,” József said, a slow smile coming to his face. “That’s another mademoiselle altogether.”
“Maybe you can spare one for me.”
“Not a chance, old boy,” József said. “I’m afraid I need them all to myself.” And he slipped through the balcony door and returned to the large front room, where he wrapped the orange silk scarf around his neck again and put on a loose jacket of smoke-colored wool. He caught up Andras’s satchel and Andras took the suitcase, and they brought everything down in the lift.
“I wish I could see you to that boardinghouse, but I’m late to meet my friend,” József said once they’d gotten everything out to the curb. “Here’s the cab fare, though. No, I insist! And come around for a drink sometime, won’t you? Let me know how you’re getting on.” He clapped Andras on the shoulder, shook his hand, and went off in the direction of the Panthéon, whistling.
Madame V, the proprietress of the boardinghouse, had a few useless words of Hungarian and plenty of unintelligible Yiddish, but no permanent place for Andras; she managed to communicate that he could spend the night on the couch in the upstairs hallway if he liked, but that he’d better go out at once to look for other lodgings. Still in a haze from the night at József’s, he ventured out into the Quartier Latin amid the artfully disheveled students with their canvas schoolbags, their portfolios, their bicycles, their stacks of political pamphlets and string-tied bakery boxes and market baskets and bouquets of flowers. Among them he felt overdressed and provincial, though his clothes were the same ones in which he had felt elegant and urban a week earlier in Budapest. On a cold bench in a dismal little plaza he combed his phrase book for the words for price, for student, for room, for how much. But it was one thing to understand that chambre à louer meant room for rent, and quite another to ring a doorbell and inquire in French about the chambre. He wandered from Saint-Michel to Saint-Germain, from the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine to the rue Clovis, re-cursing his inattentiveness in French class and making tiny notes in a tiny notebook about the locations of various chambres à louer. Before he could muster the courage to ring a single bell, he found himself utterly exhausted; sometime after dark he retreated to the boardinghouse in defeat.
That night, as he tried to find a comfortable position on the green sofa in the hallway, young men from all across Europe argued and fought and smoked and laughed and drank until long past midnight. None of the men spoke Hungarian, and none seemed to notice that there was a new man in their midst. Under different circumstances Andras might have gotten up to join them, but now he was so tired he could scarcely turn over beneath the blanket. The sofa, a spindly, ill-padded thing with wooden arms, seemed to have been designed as an instrument of torture. Once the men had gone to bed at last, rats emerged from the wainscoting to conduct their predawn scavengery; they ran the length of the hallway and stole the bread Andras had saved from dinner. The smells of decaying shoes and unwashed men and cooking grease followed him into his dreams. When he woke, sore and exhausted, he decided that one night had been enough. He would go out into the quartier that morning and inquire at the first place that advertised a room for rent.
On the rue des Écoles, near a tiny paved square with a spreading chestnut tree, he found a building with that now-familiar sign in the window: chambre à louer. He knocked on the red-painted door and crossed his arms, trying to ignore the rush of anxiety in his chest. The door swung open to reveal a short, square, heavy-browed woman, her mouth bent sideways into a scowl; on the bridge of her nose rested a pair of thick black-rimmed spectacles that made her eyes look tiny and faraway, as though they belonged to another, smaller person. Her wiry gray hair was flattened on one side, as if she had just been sleeping in a wing chair with her head on the wing. She put a fist on her hip and stared at Andras. Summoning all his courage, Andras forcefully mispronounced his need and pointed to the sign in the window.
The concierge understood. She beckoned him into a narrow tiled hall and led him up a spiral staircase with a skylight at the top. When they could go no higher, she took him down the hall to a long narrow garret with an iron bed against one wall, a crockery basin on a wooden stand, a farm table, a green wooden chair. Two dormer windows looked out onto the rue des Écoles; one of them was open, and on the windowsill sat an abandoned nest and the remnants of three blue eggs. In the fireplace there was a rusted grate, a broken toasting fork, an ancient crust of bread. The concierge shrugged and named a price. Andras searched his mind for the names of numbers, then cut the price in half. The concierge spat on the floor, stomped her feet, railed at Andras
in French, and finally accepted his offer.
So it began: his life in Paris. He had an address, a brass key, a view. His view, like József’s, included the Panthéon and the pale limestone clock tower of St.-Étienne-du-Mont. Across the street was the Collège de France, and soon enough he would learn to use it as a marker for his building: 34 rue des Écoles, en face du Collège de France. Down the block was the Sorbonne. And farther away, down the boulevard Raspail, was the École Spéciale d’Architecture, where classes would begin on Monday. Once he had cleaned the room from top to bottom and unpacked his clothes into an apple crate, he counted his money and made a shopping list. He went down to the shops and bought a glass jar full of red currant jam, a box of cheap tea, a box of sugar, a mesh strainer, a bag of walnuts, a small brown crock of butter, a long baguette, and, as a single extravagance, a tiny nugget of cheese.
What a pleasure it was to fit his key to the lock, to open the door to his private room. He unloaded his groceries onto the windowsill and laid out his drawing supplies on the table. Then he sat down, sharpened a pencil with his knife, and sketched his view of the Panthéon onto a blank postal card. On its reverse he wrote his first message from Paris: Dear Tibor, I am here! I have a desperate garret; it’s everything I hoped for. On Monday I start school. Hurrah! Liberté, egalité, fraternité! With love, Andras. All he lacked was a stamp. He thought he might borrow one from the concierge; he knew there was a postbox around the corner. As he tried to picture exactly where it was, what came to mind instead was the recollection of an envelope, a wax seal, a monogram. He had forgotten the promise he’d made to the elder Mrs. Hász. Her missive to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné still waited in his suitcase. He dragged the case out from beneath the bed, half fearing that the letter would be gone, but it was there in the pocket where he’d put it, the wax seal intact. He ran downstairs to the concierge’s apartment and, with the help of his phrase book and a series of urgent gestures, begged a pair of stamps. After a search, he located the boîte aux lettres and slipped Tibor’s card inside. Then, imagining the pleasure of some silver-haired gentleman when the next day’s mail arrived, he dropped Mrs. Hász’s letter into the anonymous dark of the box.
CHAPTER FOUR. École Spéciale
TO GET TO SCHOOL he had to cross the Jardin du Luxembourg, past the elaborate Palais, past the fountain and the flowerbeds teeming with late snapdragons and marigolds. Children sailed elegant miniature boats in the fountain, and Andras thought with a kind of indignant pride of the scrapwood boats he and his brothers had sailed on the millpond in Konyár. There were green benches and close-clipped limes, a carousel with painted horses. On the far side of the park was a cluster of what looked to Andras like neat brown dollhouses; when he got closer he could hear the hum of bees. A veiled beekeeper bent toward one of the hives, waving his canister of smoke.
Andras walked down the rue de Vaugirard, with its art-supply shops and narrow cafés and secondhand bookstores, then down the wide boulevard Raspail with its stately apartment buildings. Already he felt a little more Parisian than he had when he’d first arrived. He had his apartment key on a cord around his neck, a copy of L’Oeuvre under his arm. He had knotted his scarf the way József Hász had knotted his, and he wore the strap of his leather bag slung diagonally across his chest, in the manner of the students of the Latin Quarter. His life in Budapest -the job at Past and Future, the apartment on Hársfa utca, the familiar sound of the streetcar bell-seemed to belong to another universe. With an unexpected pang of homesickness, he imagined Tibor sitting at their usual sidewalk table at their favorite café, within sight of the statue of Jókai Mór, the famous novelist who had escaped the Austrians during the 1848 revolution by disguising himself in his wife’s clothing. Farther east, in Debrecen, Mátyás would be drawing in his notebook as his classmates studied Latin declensions. And what about Andras’s parents? He must write to them tonight. He touched the silver watch in his pocket. His father had had it restored just before Andras had left; it was a fine old thing, its numbers painted in a spidery copperplate script, its hands a deep blue iridescent metal. The workings still functioned as well as they had in Andras’s grandfather’s time. Andras remembered sitting on his father’s knee and winding the watch, taking care not to tighten the spring too far; his father had done the same thing when he was a boy. And here was that same watch in Paris in 1937, a time when a person might be transported a distance of twelve hundred kilometers in a flash of days, or a telegram sent across a wire network in a matter of minutes, or a radio signal transmitted instantaneously through thin air. What a time to study architecture! The buildings he designed would be the ships in which human beings would sail toward the horizon of the twentieth century, then off the map and into the new millennium.
He found he had walked past the gates of the École Spéciale and now had to retrace his steps. Young men streamed in through a pair of tall blue doors at the center of a gray neoclassical building, the name of the school cut into the stone of its cornice. The École Spéciale d’Architecture! They had wanted him, had seen his work and chosen him, and he had come. He ran up the front steps and in through those blue doors. On the wall of the entryway was a plaque with gold bas-relief busts of two men: Emile Trélat, who had founded the school, and Gaston Trélat, who had succeeded his father as director. Emile and Gaston Trélat. Names he would always remember. He swallowed twice, smoothed his hair, and entered the registrar’s office.
The young woman behind the desk seemed a figure from a dream. Her skin was the color of dark-stained walnut, her close-cropped hair as glossy as satin. Her gaze was friendly, her dark-fringed eyes steady on his own. It didn’t occur to him to try to speak. Never before had he seen a woman so beautiful, nor had he ever encountered in real life a person of African descent. Now this gorgeous young black Frenchwoman asked him a question he couldn’t understand, and he mumbled one of his few French words-désolé-and wrote his name on a slip of paper, which he pushed across the desk. The young woman thumbed through a stack of thick envelopes in a wooden box and extracted one with his name, LÉVI, printed across the top in precise block capitals.
He thanked her in his awkward French. She told him he was welcome. He might have continued to stand there and stare if a group of students hadn’t come in at that moment, calling greetings to her and leaning over the desk to kiss her cheeks. Eh, Lucia! Ça va, bellissima? Andras slipped past the others, holding his envelope against his chest, and went out into the hall. Everyone had gathered under the glass roof of a central atrium where studio assignments had just been posted. He sat down on a low bench there and opened his envelope to find a list of classes:
COURS -PROFESSEUR
HISTOIRE D ’A RCHITECTURE -A. P ERRET
LES S TATIQUES -v. L E B OURGEOIS
ATELIER -P. V AGO
DESSINAGE -M. L ABELLE
All matter-of-fact, as though it were perfectly natural for Andras to study those subjects under the tutelage of famous architects. There was a long list of required texts and materials, and a small white card handwritten in Hungarian (by whom?) indicating that Andras, due to his scholarship status, would be permitted to purchase his books and supplies on the school’s credit at a bookstore on the boulevard Saint-Michel.
He read and reread the message, then looked around the atrium, wondering who could have been responsible for that piece of communication. The crowd of students provided no clue. None of them looked even vaguely Hungarian; they were all hopelessly, perfectly Parisian. But in one corner a trio of uncertain-looking young men stood close together and scanned the room. He could tell at a glance that they were first-year students, and the names on their folders suggested they were Jewish: ROSEN, POLANER, BEN YAKOV. He raised a hand in greeting, and they nodded, a kind of tacit recognition passing between them. The tallest of them waved him over.
Rosen was lanky, freckled, with unruly red hair and the vague beginnings of a goatee. He took Andras by the shoulder and introduced Ben Yakov, who resembled t
he handsome French film star Pierre Fresnay; and Polaner, small and light-boned, with a neat, close-shorn head and tapering hands. Andras greeted everyone and repeated his own name, and the young men’s conversation continued in quick French as Andras tried to pick up a thread of meaning. Rosen seemed to be the leader of the group; he led the conversation, and the others listened and responded. Polaner seemed nervous, buttoning and unbuttoning the top button of his antique-looking velvet jacket. The handsome Ben Yakov eyed a group of young women; one of them waved, and he waved in return. Then he leaned in toward Polaner and Rosen to make what could only have been a suggestive joke, and the three of them laughed. Though Andras found himself struggling to follow the men’s talk, and though they had hardly addressed him at all, he felt an acute desire to know them. When they went to look at the studio lists, he was glad to find they were all in the same group.
After a short time the students began to move out into the stone-walled courtyard, where tall trees overshadowed rows of wooden benches. One student carried a lectern to a small paved area at the front, and the others sat down on the benches. From beyond the stone courtyard walls came the rush and hum of traffic. But Andras was here inside, sitting beside three men whose names he knew; he was one of these students, and he belonged on this side of the wall. He tried to take note of the feeling, tried to imagine how he might write about it to Tibor, to Mátyás. But before he could put the words together in his mind, a door opened in the side of the building and a man strode out. He looked as though he could have been a military captain; he wore a long gray cloak lined in red, and sported a short triangular beard with wax-curled moustaches. His eyes were narrow and fierce behind rimless pince-nez. In one hand he carried a walking stick, and in the other what looked like a jagged gray rock. Any other man, it seemed to Andras, would have had to bow under the weight of the thing, but this man crossed the courtyard with his back straight and his chin set at a martial angle. He stepped up to the lectern and set the rock down upon it with a hollow thud.
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