So he told her the story just as he’d always heard it: Before his father had owned the lumberyard, he had suffered a string of misfortunes that had earned him the nickname of Lucky Béla. His own father had fallen ill while Béla was at rabbinical school in Prague, and had died as soon as he returned home. The vineyard he inherited had succumbed to blight. His first wife had died in childbirth, along with the baby, a girl; not long after, his house had burned to the ground. All three of his brothers were killed in the Great War, and his mother had given in to grief and drowned herself in the Tisza. At thirty he was a ruined man, penniless, his family dead. For a time he lived on the charity of the Jews of Konyár, sleeping in the Orthodox shul at night and eating what they left for him. Then, at the end of a drought summer, a famous Ukrainian miracle rabbi arrived from across the border and set up temporary quarters in the shul. He studied Torah with the local men, settled disputes, officiated at weddings, granted divorces, prayed for rain, danced in the courtyard with his disciples. One morning at dawn he came upon Andras’s father sleeping in the sanctuary. He’d heard the story of this unfortunate, this man whom all the village said must be suffering from a curse; they seemed to regard him with a kind of gratitude, as if he’d drawn the attention of the evil eye away from the rest of them. The rabbi roused Béla with a benediction, and Béla looked up in speechless fear. The rabbi was a gaunt man with an ice-white beard; his eyebrows stood out from the curve of his forehead like lifted wings, his eyes dark and liquid beneath them.
“Listen to me, Béla Lévi,” the rabbi whispered in the half-light of the sanctuary. “There’s nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best. You must fast for two days and go to the ritual bath, then accept the first offer of work you receive.”
Even if Lucky Béla had been a believer in miracles, his misfortunes would have made him a skeptic. “I’m too hungry to fast,” he said.
“Practice at hunger makes the fast easier,” the rabbi said.
“How do you know there’s not a curse on me?”
“I try not to wonder how I know. Certain things I just know.” And the rabbi made another blessing over Béla and left him alone in the sanctuary.
What more did Lucky Béla have to lose? He fasted for two days and bathed in the river at night. The next morning he wandered toward the railroad tracks, faint with hunger, and picked an apple from a stunted tree beside a white brick cottage. The proprietor of the lumberyard, an Orthodox Jew, stepped out of the cottage and asked Béla what he thought he was doing.
“I used to have a vineyard,” Béla said. “When I had a vineyard, I would have let you pick my grapes. When I had a house I would have welcomed you to my house. My wife would have given you something to eat. Now I have neither grapes nor house. I have no wife. I have no food. But I can work.”
“There’s no work for you here,” the man said, gently, “but come inside and eat.”
The man’s name was Zindel Kohn. His wife, Gitta, set bread and cheese before Lucky Béla. With Zindel and Gitta and their five small children, Lucky Béla ate; as he did, he allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past. He could not have imagined that this house would become his own house, that his own children would eat bread and cheese at this very table. But by the end of the afternoon he had a job: The boy who worked the mechanical saw at Zindel Kohn’s lumberyard had decided to become a disciple of the Ukrainian rabbi. He had left that morning without notice.
Six years later, when Zindel Kohn and his family moved to Debrecen, Lucky Béla took over the lumberyard. He married a black-haired girl named Flóra who bore him three sons, and by the time the oldest was ten, Béla had earned enough money to buy the lumberyard outright. He did a fine business; people in Konyár needed building materials and firewood in every season. Before long, hardly anyone in Konyár remembered that Lucky Béla’s nickname had been given in irony. The history might have been allowed to fade altogether had it not been for the return of the Ukrainian rabbi; this was at the height of the worldwide depression, just before the High Holidays. The rabbi spent an evening at Lucky Béla’s house and asked if he might tell his story in synagogue. It might help the Jews of Konyár, he said, to be reminded of what God would do for his children if they refused to capitulate to despair. Lucky Béla consented. The rabbi told the story, and the Jews of Konyár listened. Though Béla insisted his good fortune was due entirely to the generosity of others, people began to regard him as a kind of holy figure. They touched his house for good luck when they passed, and asked him to be godfather to their children. Everyone believed he had a connection to the divine.
“You must have thought so yourself as a child,” Madame Morgenstern said.
“I did! I thought he was invincible-even more so than most children think of their parents,” Andras said. “Sometimes I wish I’d never lost the illusion.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “I understand.”
“My parents are getting older,” Andras said. “I hate to think of them alone in Konyár. My father had pneumonia last year, and couldn’t work for a month afterward.” He hadn’t spoken about this to anyone in Paris. “My younger brother’s at school a few hours away, but he’s caught up in his own life. And now my older brother’s leaving, going off to medical school in Italy.”
A shadow came to Madame Morgenstern’s features again, as if she’d experienced an inward twist of pain. “My mother’s getting older, too,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, a very long time.” She fell silent and glanced away from the table at the tall west-facing windows. The late autumn light fell in a diagonal plane across her face, illuminating the tapered curve of her mouth. “Forgive me,” she said, trying to smile; he offered his handkerchief, and she pressed it to her eyes.
He found himself fighting the impulse to touch her, to trace a line from her nape down the curve of her back. “Perhaps I’ve stayed too long,” he said.
“No, please,” she said. “You haven’t even had dessert.”
As if she’d been listening just beyond the dining-room door, Mrs. Apfel came in at that moment to serve the walnut strudel. Andras found that he had an appetite again. He was ravenous, in fact. He ate three slices of strudel and drank coffee with cream. As he did, he told Madame Morgenstern about his studies, about Professor Vago, about the trip to Boulogne-Billancourt. He found her easier to talk to than Madame Gérard. She had a way of pausing in quiet thought before she responded; she would pull her lips in pensively, and when she spoke, her voice was low and encouraging. After lunch they went back to the parlor and looked through her album of picture postcards. Her dancer friends had traveled as far as Chicago and Cairo. There was even a hand-colored postcard from Africa: three animals that looked like deer, but were slighter and more graceful, with straight upcurved horns and almond-shaped eyes. The French word for them was gazelle.
“Gazelle,” Andras said. “I’ll try to remember.”
“Yes, try,” she said, and smiled. “Next time I’ll test you.”
When the afternoon light had begun to wane, she rose and led Andras to the hallway, where his coat and hat hung on a polished stand. She gave him his things and returned his handkerchief. As she led him down the stairs she pointed out the photographs on the wall, images of students from years past: girls in ethereal clouds of tulle or sylphlike draperies of silk, young dancers under the transient spell of costumes and makeup and stage lights. Their expressions were serious, their arms as pale and nude as the branches of winter trees. He wanted to stay and look. He wondered if any of the photographs were of Madame Morgenstern herself when she was a child.
“Thank you for everything,” he said when they’d reached the bottom of the stairs.
“Please.” She put a slim hand on his arm. “I should thank you. You were very kind to stay.”
Andras flushed so deeply at the pressure of her hand that he could feel the blood beating in his temples. She opened the
door and he stepped out into the chill of the afternoon. He found he couldn’t look at her to say goodbye. Next time I’ll test you. But she’d returned his handkerchief as though their paths were unlikely to cross again. He spoke his goodbye to the doorstep, to her feet in their fawn-colored shoes. Then he turned away and she closed the door behind him. Without thinking, he retraced his steps toward the river until he had reached the Pont Marie. There he paused at the edge of the bridge and brought out the handkerchief. It was still damp where she’d used it to dry her eyes. As if in a dream, he put a corner of it into his mouth and tasted the salt she’d left there.
CHAPTER EIGHT. Gare d’Orsay
THAT NIGHT HE found it impossible to sleep. He couldn’t stop reviewing every detail of his afternoon at the Morgensterns’. The shameful bouquet, and how doubly shameful it had looked when she’d carried it into the parlor in the blue glass vase. The moment when he’d realized that she must be the elder Mrs. Hász’s daughter, and how it had flustered him to discover it-how he’d said The pleasure to make your acquaintance and Thank you for the invitation of me. How she’d held her back straight as though she were always dancing, until the moment at the table after Elisabet had gone-the way her back had curved then, showing the linked pearls of her spine, and how he’d wanted to touch her. The way she’d listened as he’d told his father’s story. The close heat of her shoulder as she sat beside him on the sofa in the parlor, paging through the album of picture postcards. The moment at the door when she’d rested her hand on his arm. He tried to re-create an image of her in his mind-the dark sweep of hair across her brow, the gray eyes that seemed too large for her face, the clean line of her jaw, the mouth that drew in upon itself as she considered what he’d said-but he couldn’t make the disparate elements add up to an image of her. He saw her again as she turned to smile at him over her shoulder, girlish and wise at the same time. But what was he thinking, what could he be thinking? What an absurdity for him to think this way about a woman like Claire Morgenstern-he, Andras, a twenty-two-year-old student who lived in an unheated room and drank tea from a jam jar because he couldn’t afford coffee or a coffee cup. And yet she hadn’t sent him away, she’d kept talking to him, he’d made her laugh, she’d accepted his handkerchief, she’d touched his arm in a confiding and intimate manner.
For hours he rolled over and over in bed, trying to put her out of his mind. When the sky outside his window filled with a deep gray-blue light, he wanted to cry. All night he’d lain awake, and soon he would have to get up and go to class and then to work, where Madame Gérard would want to hear about the visit. It was Monday morning, the beginning of a new week. The night was over. The only thing he could do was to get out of bed and write the letter he had to write, the one he had to mail before he went to school that morning. He took an old piece of sketch paper and began a draft:
Dear Mme Morgenstern,
Thank you for the
For the what? For the very pleasant afternoon? How flat it would sound. How much that would make it seem like any ordinary afternoon. Whatever else it had been, it hadn’t been that. What was he supposed to write? He wanted to express his gratitude for Madame Morgenstern’s hospitality; that was certain. But underneath he wanted to send a coded message, to convey what he had felt and what he felt now-that a kind of electrical conduit had opened between them and ran between them still; that he’d taken her at her word when she’d suggested they might see each other again. He scratched out the lines he’d written and started again.
Dear Madame Morgenstern,
As absurd as it sounds, I’ve been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck.
And then what? What would he do, given the chance? For one brief delirious moment he thought of those old photographs that depicted the elaborate sexual positions, the silver images of entwined couples visible only when the cards were held at an angle to the light. He remembered standing in the changing room near the gymnastics hall with four other boys, each of them hunched over and holding a card, their gym shorts around their ankles, each in solitary agony as the silver couples flashed into and out of view. His card had shown a woman lying on a settee, her legs raised in a sharp V. She wore a Victorian-style gown that revealed her arms and shoulders and had fallen away from her legs entirely, leaving them bare as they strained toward the ceiling. A man bent over her, doing what even the Victorians did.
Flushed with shame and desire, he scratched out the lines again to begin another draft. He dipped his pen and wiped off the excess ink.
Dear Madame Morgenstern,
Thank you for your hospitality and for the pleasure of your company. My own accommodations are too poor to allow me to return your invitation, but if I may be of service to you in some other way, I hope you will not hesitate to call upon me. In the meantime I shall retain the hope that we will meet again.
Yours sincerely,
ANDRAS LÉVI
He read and reread the draft, wondering if he should try to write in French instead of Hungarian; finally he decided he was likely to make an imbecillic error in French. He wrote a fair copy on a sheet of thin white paper, which he folded in half and sealed into an envelope before he could begin to reexamine every line. Then he mailed the letter at the same blue box where he’d posted the letter from her mother.
That week he was grateful for the hard, painstaking work of model-building. In the studio he cut a rectangle of thick pasteboard to serve as a base for the model, and he traced the footprint of the building onto the base in a thin pencil line. On another piece of pasteboard he drew the shapes of the building’s four elevations, working meticulously from his measured drawing. His favorite tool was a ruler of near-transparent cellulose through which he could see the pencil lines that intersected the one he was drawing; that ruler, with its strict grid of millimeters, was an island of exactitude in the sea of tasks he had to complete, a strip of certainty in the midst of his uncertainty. Every piece of the model had to be made from sturdy material that could not be bought at a discount or substituted with flimsy stuff; everyone recalled what had happened during the first week of classes, when Polaner, trying to stretch his dwindling supply of francs, had used Bristol paper for a model, rather than pasteboard. In the middle of the critique, when Professor Vago had tapped the roof of Polaner’s model with his mechanical pencil, one wall had buckled and sent the paper chateau to its knees. Pasteboard was expensive; Andras could not afford to make a mistake, neither in the ink drawing nor the cutting. It provided some comfort to work alongside Rosen and Ben Yakov and Polaner, who were building the École Militaire, the Rotonde de la Villette, and the Théâtre de l’Odéon, respectively. Even smug Lemarque provided a welcome distraction; he’d decided to build a model of the twenty-sided Cirque d’Hiver, and could be heard periodically swearing as he traced wall after wall onto pasteboard.
In statics class there was the clear plain order of math: the three-variable equation to calculate the number and thickness of steel rods per cubic meter of concrete, the number of kilograms a support column could bear, the precise distribution of pressure along the crown of an arch. At the front of the classroom, chalking his way through a maze of calculations on the chip-edged blackboard, stood the wildly untidy Victor Le Bourgeois, professor of statics, a practicing architect and engineer, who, like Vago, was said to be a close friend of Pingusson’s. His disorder expressed itself in trousers torn at the knee, a jacket permanently grayed with chalk dust, a shaggy halo of ginger-colored hair, and a tendency to misplace the blackboard eraser. But when he began to trace the relationship between mathematical abstractions and tangible building materials, all the chaos of his person seemed to drop away. Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.
At the theater there was the relief
of being able to speak her name aloud to Madame Gérard. During intermission at the Tuesday night performance, Andras brought Madame a cup of strong coffee and waited by the door of her dressing room as she drank it. She looked up from under the graceful arch of her brows; she was stately even in the soot-stained apron and head kerchief of the Mother. “I haven’t had word from Madame Morgenstern,” she said. “How was your luncheon?”
“Quite pleasance,” Andras said, and blushed. “Pleasant, I mean.”
“Quite pleasant, he says.”
“Yes,” Andras said. “Quite.” His French vocabulary seemed to have fled.
“Aha,” said Madame Gérard, as if she understood entirely. Andras’s blush deepened: He knew she must think that something had passed between himself and Elisabet. Something had, of course, though not at all what she must have imagined.
“Madame Morgenstern is very kind,” he said.
“And Mademoiselle?”
“Mademoiselle is very…” Andras swallowed and looked at the row of lights above Madame Gérard’s mirror. “Mademoiselle is very tall.”
Madame Gérard threw her head back and laughed. “Very tall!” she said. “Indeed. And very strong-willed. I knew her when she was a little girl playing at dolls; she used to speak to them so imperiously I thought they would burst into tears. But you mustn’t be scared of Elisabet. She’s harmless, I assure you.”
Before Andras could protest that he wasn’t in the least afraid of Elisabet, the double bell sounded to signal the impending end of intermission. Madame had a costume change to complete, and Andras had to leave to finish his tasks before the third act began. Once the actors went on again, time slowed to a polar trickle. All he could think of was the letter he’d written and when a response might come. His letter might have been delivered by that afternoon’s post, and she might have posted her own response today. Her letter could arrive as soon as tomorrow. It wasn’t unreasonable to think she might invite him for lunch again that weekend.
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