"What is it?" she said.
"In Budapest, before I left, I met a woman named Elza Hasz."
Madame Morgenstern's face drained of color. "Yes?" she said.
"I went to her house on Benczur utca. She'd seen me exchanging pengo for francs at the bank, and wanted to send a box to her son in Paris. There was another woman there, an older woman, who asked me to carry something else. A letter to a certain C.
Morgenstern on the rue de Sevigne. About whom I must not inquire."
Madame Morgenstern had gone so pale that Andras thought she might faint.
When the waiter arrived a moment later with their drinks, she took up her Brunelle and emptied half the glass.
"I think you're Klara Hasz," he said, lowering his voice. "Or you were. And the woman I met was your mother."
Her mouth trembled, and she glanced toward the door. For a moment she looked as if she might flee. Then she sank back into her seat, a tense stillness coming over her body. "All right," she said. "Tell me what you know, and what you want." Her voice had thinned to a whisper; she sounded, more than anything, afraid.
"I don't know anything," he said, reaching for her hand again. "I don't want anything. I just wanted to tell you what happened. What a strange coincidence it was.
And I wanted you to know I'd met your mother. I know you haven't seen her in years."
"And you carried a box for my nephew Jozsef?" she said. "Have you spoken to him about this? About me?"
"No, not a word."
"Thank God," she said. "You can't, do you understand?"
"No," he said. "I don't understand. I don't know what any of this means. Your mother begged me not to speak to anyone about that letter, and I haven't. No one knows.
Or almost no one--I did show it to my brother when I came home from your mother's house. He thought it must be a love letter."
Klara gave a sad laugh. "A love letter! I suppose it was, in a way."
"I wish you'd tell me what this is all about."
"It's a private matter. I'm sorry you had to be involved. I can't make direct contact with my family in Budapest, and they can't send anything directly to me. Jozsef can't know I'm here. You're certain you haven't told him anything?"
"Nothing at all," Andras said. "Your mother mentioned that specifically."
"I'm sorry to make such a drama of it. But it's very important that you understand.
Some terrible things happened in Budapest when I was a girl. I'm safe now, but only as long as no one knows I'm here, or who I was before I came here."
Andras repeated his vow. If his silence would protect her, he would keep silent. If she had asked him to sign his pledge in blood upon the gray marble of the cafe table, he would have taken a knife to his hand and done it. Instead she finished her drink, not speaking, not meeting his eyes. He watched the silver harp tremble at her throat.
"What did my mother look like?" she asked finally. "Has her hair gone gray?"
"It's shot with gray," Andras said. "She wore a black dress. She's a tiny person, like you." He told her a few things about the visit--what the house had looked like, what her sister-in-law had said. He didn't tell her about her mother's grief, about the expression of entrenched mourning he had remembered all this time; what good could it have done?
But he told her a few things about Jozsef Hasz--how he'd given Andras a place to stay when he'd first come to town, and had advised him about life in the Latin Quarter.
"And what about Gyorgy?" she asked. "Jozsef's father?"
"Your
brother."
"That's right," she said, quietly. "Did you see him, too?"
"No," Andras said. "I was there only for an hour or so, in the middle of the day.
He must have been at work. From the look of the house, though, I'd say he's doing fine."
Klara put a hand to her temple. "It's rather difficult to take this in. I think this is enough for now," she said, and then, "I think I'd better go." But when she stood to put on her coat, she swayed and caught the edge of the table with her hand.
"You haven't eaten, have you?" Andras said.
"I need to be someplace quiet."
"There's a restaurant--"
"Not a restaurant."
"I live a few blocks from here. Come have a cup of tea. Then I'll take you home."
And so they went to his garret, climbing the bare wooden stairs to the top of 34
rue des Ecoles, all the way to his drafty and barren room. He offered her the desk chair, but she didn't want to sit. She stood at the window and looked down into the street, at the College de France across the way, where the clochards always sat on the steps at night, even in the coldest weather. One of them was playing a harmonica; the music made Andras think of the vast open grasslands he'd seen in American movies at the tiny cinema in Konyar. As Klara listened, he lit a fire in the grate, toasted a few slices of bread, and heated water for tea. He had only one glass--the jam jar he'd been using ever since his first morning at the apartment. But he had some sugar cubes, pilfered from the bowl at the Blue Dove. He handed the glass to Klara and she stirred sugar into her tea with his one spoon. He wished she would speak, wished she would reveal the terrible secret of her past, whatever it was. He couldn't guess the details of her story, though he suspected it must have had something to do with Elisabet: an accidental pregnancy, a jealous lover, angry relatives, some unspeakable shame.
A draft came through the ill-fitting casement, and Klara shivered. She handed him the glass of tea. "You have some too," she said. "Before it gets cold."
His throat closed with a spasm of emotion. For the first time, she'd addressed him with the familiar te instead of the formal maga. "No," he said. "I made it for you." For you: te. He offered it to her again, and she closed her hands around his own. The tea trembled between them in its glass. She took it and set it down on the windowsill. Then she moved toward him, put her arms around his waist, tucked her dark head under his chin. He raised a hand to stroke her back, disbelieving his luck, worrying that this closeness was ill-gotten, the product of his revelation and her stirred emotions. But as she shivered against him he forgot to care what had brought them to that moment. He let his hand move along the curve of her back, allowed himself to trace the architecture of her spine. She was so close he could feel the jolt of her ribcage as she pulled a sharp breath; an instant later she moved away from him, shaking her head.
He lifted his hands, surrendering. But she was already retrieving her coat from the rack, winding her scarf around her neck, putting on the red bell-shaped hat.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I have to go. I'm sorry."
...
At seven o'clock the next evening he went to see the Spectacle d'Hiver. The Sarah-Bernhardt was filled with the families of the dancers, an anxious chattering crowd.
The parents had all brought ribboned cones of roses for their daughters. The aisles were draped with fir garland, and the theater smelled of rose and pine. The scent seemed to wake him from the haze in which he'd lived since the previous night. She was backstage; in two hours' time he would see her.
Violins began to play in the orchestra pit, and the curtain rose to reveal six girls dressed in white leotards and jagged points of tulle. They seemed to levitate above the silvered floorboards, their movements dreamlike and precise. It was the way she moved, he thought. She had distilled her sharpness, her fluidity, into these little girls, into the forming vessels of their bodies. He felt as if he were caught in a strange dream; something seemed to have broken in him the night before. He had no idea how to behave in a situation like this. Nothing in his life had prepared him for it. Nor could he imagine what she might have been thinking--what she must think of him now, after he'd touched her that way. He would have liked to run backstage that moment and get it over with, whatever was going to happen.
But at intermission, when he might really have gone backstage, he was hit by a wave of panic so deep and cold he could hardly breathe. He went downstairs to
the men's washroom, where he locked himself into a stall and tried to slow his racing pulse. He leaned his forehead against the cool marble of the wall. The voices of men all around him had a soothing effect; they were fathers, they sounded like fathers. He could almost imagine that when he came out, his own father would be waiting. Lucky Bela, though sparing with words of advice, would tell him what to do. But when he came out, no one he knew was waiting; he was alone in Paris, and Klara was upstairs.
The lights flickered to signal the end of the intermission. He went up and took his seat again just as the house fell into darkness. A few rustling moments, and then blue lights glowed from the lighting bar beneath the catwalk; a high cold string of woodwind notes climbed from the orchestra pit, and the snowflakes drifted out to begin their dance.
He knew Klara was standing just behind the stage-left curtain. She was the one who had signaled the musicians to begin. The girls danced perfectly, and were replaced by taller girls, and after that taller girls still, as if the same girls were growing older backstage during the moments when the lights dimmed. But at the end of the show they all came onstage to bow, and they called out for their teacher.
She came out in a simple black dress, an orange-red dahlia pinned behind her ear, like a girl in a Mucha painting. First she made her reverence to the young dancers, then to the audience. She acknowledged the musicians and the conductor. Then she disappeared into the wings again, allowing the girls to reap the glory of their curtain calls.
Andras sensed the return of his panic, heard its millipedal footsteps drawing closer. Before it could take him again he slid out of his row and ran backstage, where Klara was surrounded by a mass of rouged, tulle-skirted girls. He couldn't get anywhere near her. But she seemed to be looking for him, or for someone in particular; she let her gaze drift over the heads of the little girls and move toward the darker edges of the wings.
Her eyes flickered past him and returned for an instant. He couldn't tell if her smile had darkened just at that moment, or if he had imagined it. In any case, she'd seen him. He took off his hat and stood twisting its brim until the crowd around her began to subside.
As the parents rushed backstage to bestow bouquets on their children, he cursed himself for failing to bring flowers. He saw that many of the parents had brought roses for her as well as for their daughters. She would have a cartload of bouquets to bring home, none of them from him. The father of the bespectacled little Sophie had brought a particularly large sheaf of flowers for Madame--red roses, Andras noted. He saw her cordially refuse countless invitations to celebratory post-performance dinners; she claimed she was exhausted and must have her rest. It was nearly an hour before the little girls had all gone home with their families, leaving Klara and Andras alone backstage. He had twisted his hat entirely out of shape by then. Her arms were full of flowers; he couldn't embrace her or even take her hand.
"You didn't have to wait," she said, giving him a half-reproachful smile.
"You've got a lot of roses there" was what he managed to say.
"Have you had dinner?"
He hadn't, and he told her so. In the prop room he found a basket for her flowers.
He loaded it and covered it with a cloth to protect the roses from the cold. As he helped her into her coat, he received a wondering look from Pely, the custodian, who had already begun to sweep up the evening's snowfall of sequins and rose petals. Andras raised his hat in farewell and they went out through the backstage door.
She took his arm as they walked along, and let him lead her to a whitewashed cafe near the Bastille. It was a place he'd passed many times in his walks around Paris; it was called Aux Marocaines. On the low tables were green bowls of cardamom pods. On the walls, wooden racks held Moroccan pottery. Everything seemed to be built on a small scale, as if made for Klara. He could afford to buy her dinner there, though just barely; a week earlier he had received a Christmas bonus from Monsieur Novak.
A waiter in a fez seated them shoulder to shoulder at a corner table. There was flatbread and honey wine, a piece of grilled fish, a vegetable stew in a clay pot. As they ate they talked only about the performance, and about Elisabet, who had departed with Marthe for Chamonix; they talked about Andras's work, and about his examinations, which he'd passed with top marks. But he was always aware of her heat and movement beside him, her arm brushing his arm. When she drank, he watched her lips touch the rim of the glass. He couldn't stop looking at the curve of her breasts beneath her close-wrapped dress.
After dinner they had strong coffee and tiny pink macaroons. Still, neither of them had mentioned what had happened the previous night--not their conversation about her family, nor what had passed between them afterward. A time or two Andras thought he saw a shadow move across her features; he waited for her to reproach him, to say she wished he'd never told her that he'd met her mother and sister-in-law, or that she hadn't meant to give him a mistaken impression. When she didn't, he began to wonder if she meant for them to pretend it had never happened. At the end of the meal he paid the bill, despite her protests; he helped her into her coat again and they walked toward the rue de Sevigne. He carried the heavy basket of flowers, thinking of the ridiculous bouquet he'd brought to that first Sunday lunch. How ignorant he'd been of what was about to befall him, how unprepared for everything he'd experienced since--the shock of attraction, the torment of her closeness on Sunday afternoons, the guilty pleasure of their growing familiarity, and then that unthinkable moment last night when she'd closed her hands around his hands--when she'd put her arms around his waist, her head against his chest.
And what would happen now? The evening was almost over. They had nearly reached her house. A light snow began to fall as they rounded the corner of her street.
At the doorstep her eyes darkened again. She leaned against the door and sighed, looking down at the roses. "Funny," she said. "We've done the winter show every December for years, but I always feel this way afterward. Like there's nothing to look forward to. Like everything's finished." She smiled. "Dramatic, isn't it?"
He let out a long breath. "I'm sorry if--last night," he began.
She stopped him with a shake of her head and told him there was nothing to apologize for.
"I shouldn't have asked about your family," he said. "If you'd wanted to talk about it, you would have."
"Probably not," she said. "It's become such a habit with me, keeping everything secret." She shook her head again, and he experienced the return of a memory from his early childhood--a night he'd spent hiding in the orchard while his brother Matyas lay in bed, gravely ill with fever. A doctor had been called in, plasters applied, medicines dispensed, all to no effect; the fever rose and rose, and everyone seemed to believe Matyas would die. Meanwhile, Andras hid in the branches of an apple tree with his terrible secret: He himself had passed the fever along, playing with Matyas after their mother told him he must keep away at all costs. If Matyas died, it would be his fault. He had never been so lonely in his life. Now he touched Klara's shoulder and felt her shiver.
"You're cold," he said.
She shook her head. Then she took her key from her little purse and turned to unlock the door. But her hand began to tremble, and she turned back toward him and raised her face to him. He bent to her and brushed the corner of her mouth with his lips.
"Come in," she said. "Just for a moment."
His pulse thundering at his temples, Andras stepped in after her. He put a hand at her waist and drew her toward him. She looked up at him, her eyes wet, and then he lifted her against him and kissed her. He closed the door with one hand. Held her. Kissed her again. Took off his thin jacket, unbuttoned the glossy black buttons of her coat, pushed it from her shoulders. He stood in the entryway with her and kissed her and kissed her--first her mouth, then her neck at the margins of her dress, then the hollow between her breasts.
He untied the black silk ribbon at her waist. The dress fell around her feet in a dark pool, and there she was before him in a r
ose-colored slip and stockings, the red-gold dahlia in her hair. He buried his hands in her dark curls and drew her to him. She kissed him again and slid her hands under his shirt. He heard himself saying her name; again he touched the bead-row of her spine, the curve of her hips. She lifted herself against him. It couldn't be true; it was true.
They went upstairs to her bedroom. He would remember it as long as he lived: the way they moved awkwardly through the doorway, his persistent certainty that she would change her mind, his disbelief as she lifted the rose-colored slip over her head. The quick work she made of his embarrassing sock braces, his poorly darned socks, his underclothes worn to transparency. The shallow curves of her dancer's body, the neat tuck of her navel, the shadow between her legs. The cool embrace of her bed, her own bed. The softness of her skin. Her breasts. His certainty that it would all be over in an embarrassing flash the instant she touched him with her hand; his wild concentration on anything else as she did it. The word baiser in his mind. The unbearable thrill of being able to touch her. The shock of the heat inside her. It could have all ended then--the city of Paris, the world, the universe--and he wouldn't have cared, would have died happy, could have found no heaven broader or more drenched with light.
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