The next day, as Andras sat in the now-familiar steel chair beside the bed, he introduced the subject of the École Spéciale for the first time since the attack. Now that Polaner was mending so well, Andras said, the doctor thought he might consider a gradual return to his schoolwork. Could Andras bring him anything from the studio-his statics texts, his drawing tools, a sketchbook?
Polaner gave Andras a look of pity and closed his eyes. “I’m not going back to school,” he said. “I’m going home to Kraków.”
Andras laid a hand on his arm. “Is that what you want?”
Polaner let out a long breath. “It’s been decided for me,” he said. “They decided it.”
“Nothing’s been decided. You’ll go back to school if you want.”
“I can’t,” Polaner said, his eyes filling with tears. “How can I face Lemarque, or any of them? I can’t go to studio and sit down at my table as if nothing happened.”
There was no use waiting any longer; Andras took the letter from his pocket and put it into Polaner’s hands. Polaner spent a long moment looking at the envelope, at his name written in Lemarque’s sharp-edged print. Then he opened the letter and flattened the single sheet against his leg. He read the six lines in which Lemarque confessed himself and begged Polaner’s pardon, both for the attack and for what he felt he must do. When he’d finished reading, he folded the note again and lay back against the pillow, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling beneath the sheet.
“Oh, God,” he said in a half whisper. “It’s as though I killed him myself.”
Before that moment Andras had believed that his hate for Lemarque had reached its limit, that with Lemarque’s death his feelings had moved past hate toward something more like pity. But as he watched Polaner grieve, as he watched the familiar lines and planes of his friend’s face crumple under the burden of the news, he found himself shaking with anger. How much worse that Lemarque’s death had come with this confession of remorse and love! Now Polaner would always have to consider what had been lost, what might have been if the world had been a different place. Here was a cruelty beyond the attack and the death itself, a sting like that of certain fire nettles that grew on the Hajdú plain: Once the spine was in, it would work its way deeper into the wound and discharge its poison there for days, for weeks, while the victim burned.
He stayed with Polaner that night long past dark, ignoring the ward nurse’s reminder that visiting hours were over. When she insisted, he told her she would have to call the police to get rid of him; eventually the long-faced doctor interceded on Andras’s behalf, and he was allowed to stay all night and into the next morning. As he kept watch beside the bed, his mind kept returning to what Polaner had said at the Blue Dove in October: I just want to keep my head down. I want to study and get my degree. If it were in his power, he thought, he would not let Polaner’s shame and grief send him home to Kraków.
Another week passed before Polaner left the hospital. When he did, it was Andras who brought him home to his room on the boulevard Saint-Germain. He watched over Polaner’s injuries, kept him fed, took his clothes to the laundry, built up the fire in the grate when it burned low. One morning he returned from the bakery to find Polaner sitting up in bed with a drawing tablet angled against his knees; the coverlet was snowed with pencil shavings, the chair beside the bed strewn with charcoals. Andras said not a word as he deposited a pair of baguettes on the table. He prepared bread and jam and tea for Polaner and gave it to him in bed, then took a seat at Polaner’s table. And all morning the noise of Polaner’s pencil followed him through his own work like music.
Later that morning, Polaner stood before the mirror at the bureau and ran his hands over his stubble-shadowed chin. “I look like a criminal,” he said. “I look like I’ve been in jail for months.”
“You look a good deal better than you did a few weeks ago.”
“It seems absurd to think about a haircut,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“What’s absurd about it?”
“I don’t know. Everything. To begin with, I don’t know if I can sit in a barber’s chair and carry on a barbershop conversation.”
Andras stood beside Polaner at the mirror, regarding him in the glass. He himself looked neater than he had in weeks; Klara had given him a trim the night before, and had made him look something like a gentleman, though she liked his hair long.
“Look,” Andras said. “Suppose I were to ask a friend to come and cut your hair. Then you wouldn’t have to sit in a barber’s chair and trade stories with the barber.”
“What friend?” Polaner said, regarding Andras in the glass.
“A rather close friend.”
Polaner turned from the mirror to look at Andras directly. “A lady friend?”
“Exactement.”
“What lady friend, Andras? What’s been going on while I’ve been lying in bed?”
“I’m afraid this has been going on quite a while longer than that. Months, actually.”
Polaner gave Andras a fleet, shy smile; for that moment, and for the first time since the news of Lemarque’s death, he seemed to have slipped back into his own skin. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me all about it.”
“Now that I’ve mentioned it, I consider myself under an obligation.”
Polaner gestured toward a chair. “Tell,” he said.
…
The next night found Polaner seated on that same chair in the middle of the room, his shoulders draped in a tea towel, the mirror propped before him, while Klara Morgenstern ministered to him with scissors and comb and talked to him in her low hypnotic way. When Andras had spoken to her the night before, she had understood at once why she must do what he asked; she had cancelled her dinner plans to do it. Earlier that evening, on their way to Polaner’s, she’d held Andras’s hand with a kind of mute fervor as they crossed the Seine, her eyes downcast with what Andras imagined to be the memory of a similar grief. Now he stood near the fire and watched the locks of hair fall, silent with gratitude to this woman who understood the need to do this simple and intimate thing, to perform this act of restoration in an attic apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. In the Tuileries
THAT SPRING, when he was not in class or tending Polaner or seeing Klara, Andras learned the design and construction of stage sets under the tutelage of Vincent Forestier. Monsieur Forestier had a studio on the rue des Gravilliers where he drafted designs and built his models; for months he had been desperately in need of a new apprentice to assist with the copying of plans, the detailed and painstaking work of model construction. Forestier was tall and heavy and mournful, with a perpetual haze of gray stubble and a habit of punctuating his utterances with shrugs of his broad shoulders, as if he himself didn’t set much store by what he was saying. It turned out that he was also a quiet genius of design. With the strictest of financial constraints and the shortest of production times, he could produce palaces and city streets and shady glens in his own incomparable style. His stage sets often metamorphosed into one another: A fairy queen’s bower might become a commandant’s office in another theater on the other side of town, and then might serve a third tour of duty as a train compartment or a hermit’s hut or a pasha’s veil-draped bed. Andras’s idea of making flats with interiors on one side and exteriors on the other was one of Forestier’s lesser tricks. He made stage sets like puzzles, stage sets that could become three or four different interiors depending upon the order in which their panels were arranged; he was a master of optical illusion. He could make an actor seem to grow or shrink as he walked across a stage, could use a subtle shift of lighting to turn a nursery into a hall of horrors. Projections of hand-colored slides could suggest distant cities or mountains, ghostly presences, memories from a character’s youth. A magic lantern made to spin by the heat of a candle could send flocks of birds rippling across a scrim. Any stage set might conceal trapdoors and rotating panels; every surface hid a mysterious interio
r that might hide another interior that might hide still another interior that bore a haunting resemblance to the exterior. Monsieur Forestier himself had a way of appearing and disappearing as if he were an actor within a set he’d designed; he would come in and assign Andras a task, and five minutes later he would have vanished as if into a wall, leaving Andras to puzzle through the difficulties of the design alone. After the tumult of the Sarah-Bernhardt, Andras found it solitary and at times lonely work. But at night, when he came home to his room, Klara might be waiting.
He rushed home every night hoping she’d be there; most often it was her ghost he embraced in the dark, the shadow presence that remained in his room when the real Klara was absent. It nearly drove him mad when days would pass between her visits. He knew, but didn’t want to be reminded, that while he was going to school and working and taking care of Polaner, Klara was conducting her own life. She gave dinner parties, went to the cinema and the theater, to jazz clubs and gallery openings. He conjured images of the people she met at her friends’ parties or entertained at her own-choreographers and dancers from abroad, young composers, writers, actors, wealthy patrons of the arts-and felt certain that her attention would turn away from him. If for three nights she failed to appear at the rue des Écoles, he would think, Well, it’s happened, and spend the next day in a haze of despair. If he walked out alone he resented every couple he passed on the street; if he tried to distract himself with a film he cursed the jet-haired screen goddess who crept from her husband’s train compartment to climb into her lover’s moonlit couchette. If, at the end of such a night, he came home to the rue des Écoles to find a light on in his windows, he would climb the stairs telling himself she had only come to break it off for good. Then he’d open the door and find her sitting beside the fire, reading a novel or stitching the hem of a practice dress or making tea, and she would get to her feet and put her arms around his neck, and he would be ashamed he’d doubted her.
In mid-May, when the trees wore close-fitting green singlets and the breeze from the Seine was warm even at night, Klara appeared one Saturday evening in a new spring hat, a pale blue toque with a ribbon of darker blue. A new hat, that simple thing: It was nothing more than a scrap of fashion, a sign of the changing season. Surely she’d worn a variety of hats since the red bell of their first winter embraces; he could remember a camel-colored one with a black feather, and a green cap with some sort of leather tassel. But this decidedly vernal hat, this pale blue toque, reminded him, as the others hadn’t, that time was passing for both of them, that he was still in school and she was still waiting for him, that what existed between them was an affair, gossamer and impermanent. He removed her dragonfly hatpin and hung the hat on the coat stand beside the door, then took both her hands and led her to the bed. She smiled and put her arms around him, saying his name into his ear, but he took her hands again and sat down with her.
“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
He couldn’t speak, couldn’t begin to say what had made him melancholy. He couldn’t find a way to tell her that her hat had reminded him that life was short and that he was no closer to being worthy of her than he’d ever been. So he took her into his arms and made love to her, and told himself he didn’t care if there were never anything more between them than these late-night meetings, this circumscribed affair.
The hours passed quickly; by the time they’d pried themselves from the warmth of the bed and dressed, it was nearly three o’clock. They descended the five flights of stairs to the street, then walked to the boulevard Saint-Michel to hail a cab. They always said their goodbyes on the same corner. He’d grown to hate that patch of pavement for taking her away from him night after night. During the day, when its power to strip him of her was cloaked beneath the love-ignoring clamor of everyday life, it seemed a different place; he could almost believe it was like any other street corner, a place of no particular significance. But now, at night, it was his nemesis. He didn’t want to see it-not the bookstore across the street, nor the fenced limes, nor the pharmacy with its glowing green cross: none of it. He turned with her instead down another street and they walked toward the Seine.
“Where are we going?” she said, smiling up at him.
“I’m walking you home.”
“All right,” she said. “It’s a beautiful night.” And it was. A May breeze came up the channel of the Seine as they crossed the bridges toward the Marais. The sidewalks were still full of men and women in evening clothes; no one seemed ready to give up the night. As they walked, Andras entertained the impossible fantasy that when they reached Klara’s house they would climb the stairs together and move noiselessly down the hall to her bedroom, where they would fall asleep together in her white bed. But at Number 39 they found the lights ablaze; Mrs. Apfel ran downstairs at the sound of Klara’s key and told her that Elisabet had not yet been home.
Klara’s eyes widened with panic. “It’s past three!”
“I know,” Mrs. Apfel said, twisting her apron. “I didn’t know where to find you.”
“Oh, God, what could have happened? She’s never been this late.”
“I’ve been all over the neighborhood looking for her, Madame.”
“And I’ve been out all this time! Oh, God. Three in the morning! She said she was just going to a dance with Marthe!”
A panicked hour followed, during which Klara made a series of telephone calls and learned that Marthe hadn’t seen Elisabet all night, that the hospitals had admitted no one by the name of Elisabet Morgenstern, and that the police had received no report of foul play involving a girl of Elisabet’s description. When she’d hung up the phone, Klara walked up and down the parlor, her hands on her head. “I’ll kill her,” she said, and then burst into tears. “Where is she? It’s nearly four o’ clock!”
It had occurred to Andras that Elisabet was most likely with her blond American, and that the reason for her absence was in all probability similar to the reason for Klara’s late return. He’d sworn to keep her secret; he hesitated to speak his suspicions aloud. But he couldn’t watch Klara torture herself. And besides that, it might be dangerous to hesitate. He imagined Elisabet in peril somewhere-drink-poisoned in the aftermath of one of József’s parties, or alone in a distant arrondissement after a dance-hall night gone wrong-and he knew he had to speak.
“Your daughter has a gentleman friend,” he said. “I saw them together one night at a party. We might find out where he lives, and check there.”
Klara’s eyes narrowed. “What gentleman friend? What party?”
“She begged me not to tell you,” Andras said. “I promised her I wouldn’t.”
“When did this happen?”
“Months ago,” Andras said. “January.”
“January!” She put a hand against the sofa as if to keep herself upright. “Andras, you can’t mean that.”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner. I didn’t want to betray Elisabet’s trust.”
The look in her eyes was pure rage. “What is this person’s name?”
“I know his first. I don’t know his last. But your nephew knows him. We can go to his place-I’ll go up, and you can wait in the cab.”
She took up her light coat from the sofa, and a moment later they were running down the stairs. But when they opened the door they found Elisabet on the doorstep, holding a pair of evening shoes in one hand, a cone of spun-sugar candy in the other. Klara, standing in the doorway, took a long look at her, at the shoes, the cone of candy; it was clear she hadn’t come from an innocent evening with Marthe. Elisabet, in turn, cast a long look at Andras. He couldn’t hold her gaze, and in that instant she seemed to understand that he had betrayed her; she turned an expression of startled outrage upon him, then pushed past him and her mother and ran up the stairs. A few moments later they heard her bedroom door slam.
“We’ll talk later,” Klara said, and left him standing in the entryway, having earned the furious contempt of both Morgenstern
s.
“I think you ought to know what kind of woman my mother is,” Elisabet said.
She sat on a bench in the Tuileries and Andras stood before her; two days had passed since he’d last seen Klara, and no word had come from the rue de Sévigné. Then that afternoon, Elisabet had surprised him in the courtyard of the École Spéciale, causing Rosen and Ben Yakov to think she must be the mysterious woman he’d been seeing all that time-the woman they’d never met, whom he’d mentioned only in the vaguest terms during their conversations at the Blue Dove. When they emerged from studio and saw Elisabet standing in the courtyard, her cold eyes fixed upon Andras, her arms crossed over the bodice of her pale green dress, Rosen gave a whistle and Ben Yakov raised an eyebrow.
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