“I hate to disturb you when you’re already so busy.”
“Madame Gérard sent you, didn’t she.”
Andras confessed that she had.
“That woman,” said Madame Courbet. But she got up from her little chair and stood in front of Andras, looking him up and down. “I wouldn’t do this for just anyone,” she said. “You’re a good young man. They hound you to death here and pay you almost nothing, but you’ve never been short with me. Which is more than I can say for certain people.” She took a tape measure from a table and strapped a pincushion to her wrist. “Now, a gentleman’s shirt, is it? You’ll want a plain white oxford, of course. Nothing fancy.” With a few deft movements she measured Andras’s neck and shoulders and the length of his arm, then went to a wardrobe cabinet marked CHEMISES. From it she extracted a fine white shirt with a crisp collar. She showed Andras how the shirt contained a special pocket inside for a tube of fake blood; in one play, a man had to be stabbed night after night by his wife’s jealous lover, and Madame Courbet had had to make an endless supply of shirts. From a drawer marked CRVT she selected a blue silk tie decorated with partridges. “It’s an aristocrat’s tie,” she said, “a rich man’s tie done up from a scrap. Look.” She turned the tie over to show him how she’d sewn the silk remnant onto a plain cotton backing. Andras put it on along with the shirt, and she pinned the shirt for a swift alteration. At the end of the evening she gave him the finished shirt, wrapped in brown paper. “Don’t let anyone else know where you got this,” she said. “I wouldn’t want the word to get out.” But she pinched his ear affectionately as she sent him on his way.
As he was leaving, he had a sudden inspiration. He went to the grand front entrance of the theater, where Pély, the custodian, was sweeping the marble floor with his push broom. As usual, Pély had set the previous week’s flower arrangements in a row inside the front doors; in the morning they would be picked up by the florist, vases and all, and replaced with new ones. Andras tipped his cap at Pély.
“If no one’s using these flowers,” he said, “may I?”
“Of course! Take them all. Take as many as you like.”
Andras gathered a staggering armload of roses and lilies and chrysanthemums, branches with red berries, faux bluebirds on green twigs, feathery bunches of fern. He would not arrive empty-handed at the Morgensterns’ on the rue de Sévigné; no, not he.
CHAPTER SEVEN. A Luncheon
IT HAD BEEN only a few weeks since Andras had studied the architecture of the Marais with Perret’s class. They had taken a special trip to see the Hôtel de Sens, the fifteenth-century city palace with its turrets and leonine gargoyles, its confusion of rooflines, its cramped and cluttered façade. Andras had expected Perret’s lecture to be a stern critique, a disquisition on the virtues of simplicity. But the lesson had been about the strength of the building, the fine craftsmanship that had allowed it to endure. Perret moved his hand along the stonework of the front entrance, showing the students what care the masons had taken in cutting the voussoirs of the Gothic arches. As he spoke, a pair of Orthodox men had appeared on the street, leading a group of schoolboys in yarmulkes. The two groups of students had stared at each other as they passed. The boys whispered to each other, looking at Perret in his military cloak; a few lagged behind as if to hear what Perret might say next. One boy snapped a salute, and his teacher delivered a reprimand in Yiddish.
Now Andras passed behind the Hôtel de Sens, past the manicured topiary gardens and the raised beds planted with purple kale for winter. Hefting his load of flowers, he sidestepped through the traffic on the rue de Rivoli. In the Marais the streets had an inside feel, almost as if they were part of a movie set. In Cinescope and Le Film Complet, Andras had seen the miniature cities built inside cavernous sound-stages in Los Angeles; here, the pale blue winter sky seemed like the arching roof of a studio, and Andras half expected to see men and women in medieval costume moving between the buildings, trailed by megaphone-wielding directors, by cameramen with their rafts of complicated equipment. There were kosher butchers and Hebrew bookshops and synagogues, all of them with signs written in Yiddish, as though this were a different country within the city. But there was no anti-Semitic graffiti of the kind that regularly appeared in the Jewish Quarter in Budapest. Instead the walls were bare, or plastered with advertisements for soap or chocolate or cigarettes. As Andras entered the tall corridor of the rue de Sévigné, a black taxi roared past, nearly knocking him off his feet. He steadied himself, shifted his vast bouquet from one arm to the other, and checked the address on the card Madame Gérard had given him.
Across the street he could see a windowed shop front with a wooden sign cut into the form of a child ballerina, and beneath it the legend ÉCOLE DE BALLET-MME MORGENSTERN, MAÎTRESSE. He crossed the street. A set of demi-curtained windows ran along both sides of the corner building, and when he stood on his toes he could see an empty room with a floor of yellow wood. One wall was lined from end to end with mirrors; polished wooden practice barres ran along the others. A squat upright piano crouched in one corner, and beside it stood a table with an old-fashioned gramophone, its glossy black morning-glory horn catching the light. A diffuse haze of dust motes hovered in the midday silence. Some remnant of movement, of music, seemed revealed in that tourbillon of dust, as if ballet continued to exist in that room whether a class was being conducted there or not.
The building entrance was a green door set with a leaded glass window. Andras rang the bell and waited. Through the sheer panel that covered the window, he could see a stout woman descending a flight of stairs. She opened the door and put a hand on her hip, giving him an appraising look. She was red-faced, kerchiefed, with a deep smell of paprika about her, like the women who brought vegetables and goat’s milk to sell at the market in Debrecen.
“Madame Morgenstern?” he said, with hesitation; she didn’t look much like a ballet mistress.
“Hah! No,” she said in Hungarian. “Come in and close the door behind you. You’ll let in the cold.”
So he must have passed her inspection; he was glad, because the smells coming from inside were making him dizzy with hunger. He stepped into the entry, and the woman continued in a rapid stream of Hungarian as she took his coat and hat. What an enormous lot of flowers. She would see if there was a vase upstairs large enough to hold them. Lunch was nearly ready. She had prepared stuffed cabbage, and she hoped he liked it, because there was nothing else, except for spaetzle and a fruit compote and some sliced cold chicken and a walnut strudel. He should follow her upstairs. Her name was Mrs. Apfel. They climbed to the second floor, where she directed him to a front parlor decorated with worn Turkish rugs and dark furniture; she told him to wait there for Madame Morgenstern.
He sat on a gray velvet settee and took a long breath. Beneath the heady smell of stuffed cabbage there was the dry lemony tang of furniture polish and a faint scent of licorice. On a small carved table before him was a candy dish, a cut-glass nest filled with pink and lilac sugar eggs. He took an egg and ate it: anise. He straightened his tie and made sure the cotton backing wasn’t showing. After a moment he heard the click of heels in the hallway. A slim shadow moved across the wall, and a girl entered with a blue glass vase in her hands. The vase bristled with a wild profusion of flowers and branches and fake bluebirds, the daylilies beginning to darken at their edges, the roses hanging heavy on their stems. From behind this mass of fading blooms the girl looked at Andras, her dark hair brushed like a wing across her forehead.
“Thank you for the flowers,” she said in French.
As she set the vase on the sideboard, he saw she wasn’t a girl at all; her features had the sharper angles of an adult woman’s, and she held her back straight as if from decades of ballet training. But she was lithe and small, her hands like a child’s on the blue glass vase. Andras drank in a flood of embarrassment as he watched her arrange the bouquet. Why had he brought so many half-dead flowers? Why the bluebirds? Why all those branches?
Why hadn’t he just bought something simple at the corner market? A dozen daisies? A sheaf of lupines? How much could it have cost? A couple of francs? The wood nymph smiled back at him over her shoulder, then came to shake his hand.
“Claire Morgenstern,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Mr. Lévi. Madame Gérard has had many kind things to say about you.”
He took her hand, trying not to stare; she looked decades younger than he’d imagined. He’d envisioned her as a woman of Madame Gérard’s age, but this woman couldn’t have been more than thirty. She had a quiet, astonishing beauty-fine bones, a mouth like a smooth pink-skinned fruit, large intelligent gray eyes. Claire Morgenstern: So this was the C. of the letter, not some elderly gentleman who had once been Mrs. Hász’s lover. Her large gray eyes were Mrs. Hász’s eyes, the quiet grief he saw there a mirror of the expression he’d seen in the older woman’s eyes. This Claire Morgenstern had to be Mrs. Hász’s daughter. A long moment passed before Andras could speak.
“The pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said in rushed and stilted French, knowing he’d gotten it wrong as soon as he said it. Belatedly he remembered to rise, and though he struggled for the right words, found himself continuing in the same vein. “Thank you for the invitation of me,” he stammered, and sat down again.
Madame Morgenstern took a seat beside him on a low chair. “Would you rather speak Hungarian?” she asked in Hungarian. “We can, if you like.”
He looked up at her as if from the bottom of a well. “French is fine,” he said, in Hungarian. And then in French, again, “French is fine.”
“All right, then,” she said. “You’ll have to tell me what Hungary is like these days. It’s been years since I was there, and Elisabet has never been.”
As if she’d been conjured by the mention of her name, a tall stern-looking girl entered the room, carrying a pitcher of iced tea. She was broad-shouldered like the swimmers Andras had admired at Palatinus Strand in Budapest; she gave him a look of impatient disdain as she filled his glass.
“This is my Elisabet,” said Madame Morgenstern. “Elisabet, this is Andras.”
Andras couldn’t make himself believe that this girl was Madame Morgenstern’s daughter. In Elisabet’s hands, the tea pitcher looked like a child’s toy. He drank his tea and looked from mother to daughter. Madame Morgenstern stirred her tea with a long spoon, while Elisabet, having set the pitcher on a table, threw herself into a wing chair and checked her wristwatch.
“If we don’t eat now I’ll be late for the movie,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet Marthe in an hour.”
“What movie?” Andras said, searching for a thread of conversation.
“You wouldn’t be interested,” Elisabet said. “It’s in French.”
“But I speak French,” Andras said.
Elisabet gave him a dry smile. “May-juh-pargl-Fronsay,” she said.
Madame Morgenstern closed her eyes. “Elisabet,” she said.
“What?”
“You know what.”
“I just want to go to the movies,” Elisabet said, and knocked her heels dully against the rug. Then she tilted her chin toward Andras and said, “Lovely tie.”
Andras looked down. His tie had flipped over as he’d leaned forward to take his glass of tea, and now the cotton backing faced the world, while the gold partridges flew unseen against his shirtfront. Hot with shame, he turned it around and stared into his tea.
“Lunch is served!” said the red-faced Mrs. Apfel from the doorway, pushing back her kerchief. “Come now, before the cabbage gets cold.”
…
There was a proper dining room, with polished wooden china cabinets and a white cloth on the table: echoes of the house on Benczúr utca, Andras thought. But there were no exsanguinated sandwiches here; the table was heavy with platters of stuffed cabbage and chicken and bowls of spaetzle, as though there were eight of them eating instead of three. Madame Morgenstern sat at the head of the table, Andras and Elisabet across from each other. Mrs. Apfel served the stuffed cabbage and spaetzle; Andras, grateful for the distraction, tucked his napkin into his collar and began to eat. Elisabet frowned at her plate. She pushed the cabbage aside and began eating the spaetzle, one tiny dumpling at a time.
“I hear you’re interested in mathematics,” Andras said, speaking to the top of Elisabet’s lowered head.
She raised her eyes. “Did my mother tell you that?”
“No, Madame Gérard did. She said you won a competition.”
“Anyone can do high-school mathematics.”
“Do you think you’ll want to study it in college?”
Elisabet shrugged. “If I go to college.”
“Darling, you can’t live on spaetzle,” Madame Morgenstern said quietly, looking at Elisabet’s plate. “You used to like stuffed cabbage.”
“It’s cruel to eat meat,” Elisabet said, and leveled her eyes at Andras. “I’ve seen how they butcher cows. They stick a knife in the neck and draw it downwards, like this, and the blood pours out. My biology class took a trip to a shochet. It’s barbaric.”
“Not really,” Andras said. “My brothers and I used to know the kosher butcher in our town. He was a friend of our father’s, and he was quite gentle with the animals.”
Elisabet watched him intently. “And can you explain to me how you gently butcher a cow?” she said. “What did he do? Pet them to death?”
“He used the traditional method,” Andras said, his tone sharper than he’d intended. “One quick cut across the neck. It couldn’t have hurt them for more than a second.”
Madame Morgenstern set her silverware down and put a napkin to her mouth as if she felt ill, and Elisabet’s expression became slyly triumphant. Mrs. Apfel stood in the doorway holding a water pitcher, waiting to see what would happen next.
“Go on,” Elisabet said. “What did he do then, after he made the cut?”
“I think we’re finished with this subject,” Andras said.
“No, please. I’d like to hear the rest, now that you’ve started.”
“Elisabet, that’s enough,” Madame Morgenstern said.
“But the conversation’s just getting interesting.”
“I said it’s enough.”
Elisabet crumpled her napkin and threw it onto the table. “I’m finished,” she said. “You can sit here with your guest and eat meat. I’m going to the cinema with Marthe.” She pushed her chair back and stood, nearly upsetting Mrs. Apfel and the water pitcher, then went off down the hall and knocked around in a distant room. A few moments later her heavy footsteps echoed on the stairs. The door of the dance studio slammed and its mullioned window jingled.
At the dining table, Madame Morgenstern lowered her forehead onto her palm. “I apologize, Monsieur Lévi,” she said.
“No, please,” he said. “It’s fine.” In fact, he wasn’t at all sorry to have been left alone with Madame Morgenstern. “Don’t be upset on my account,” he said. “That was a terrible topic of conversation. I apologize.”
“There’s no need,” Madame Morgenstern said. “Elisabet is impossible at times, that’s all. I can’t do anything with her once she’s decided she’s angry at me.”
“Why should she be angry at you?”
She gave a half smile and shrugged. “It’s complicated, I’m afraid. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl. I’m her mother. She doesn’t like me to have anything to do with her social affairs. And I mustn’t remind her that we’re Hungarian, either. She considers Hungarians an unenlightened people.”
“I’ve felt that way, too, at times,” Andras said. “I’ve spent a lot of time lately struggling to be French.”
“Your French is excellent, as it turns out.”
“No, it’s terrible. And I’m afraid I did nothing to dispel your daughter’s notion that Magyars are barbarians.”
Madame Morgenstern hid a smile behind her hand. “You were rather quick with that business about the butcher,” she said.
&nb
sp; “I’m sorry,” Andras said, but he’d started to laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about that over lunch.”
“So you really did know the butcher in your town,” she said.
“I did. And I saw him at his work. But Elisabet was right, I’m afraid-it was awful!”
“You must have grown up-where? Somewhere in the countryside?”
“Konyár,” he said. “Near Debrecen.”
“Konyár? That’s not twenty kilometers from Kaba, where my mother was born.” A shade passed over her features and was gone.
“Your mother,” he said. “But she doesn’t live there anymore?”
“No,” Madame Morgenstern said. “She lives in Budapest.” She fell silent for a moment, then turned the conversation back to Andras’s history. “So you’re a Hajdú, too. A flatlands boy.”
“That’s right,” he said. “My father owns a lumberyard in Konyár.” So she wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t discuss the subject of her family. He had been on the verge of mentioning the letter-of saying I’ve met your mother-but the moment had passed now, and there was a kind of relief in the prospect of talking about Konyár. Ever since he’d arrived in Paris and had mastered enough French to answer questions about his origins, he’d been telling people he was from Budapest. What would anyone have known of Konyár? And to those who would have known, like József Hász or Pierre Vago, Konyár meant a small and backward place, a town you were lucky to have escaped. Even the name sounded ridiculous-the punchline of a bawdy joke, the sound of a jumping jack springing from a box. But he really was from Konyár, from that dirt-floored house beside the railroad tracks.
“My father’s something of a celebrity in town, to tell the truth,” Andras said.
“Indeed! What is he known for?”
“His terrible luck,” Andras said. And then, feeling suddenly brave: “Shall I tell you his story, the way they tell it at home?”
“By all means,” she said, and folded her hands in anticipation.
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