Andras blinked at him, trying to understand what he meant.
“It’s not just a problem for Tibor,” Vago continued, looking into Andras’s eyes. “It’s also a problem for you. In short, your scholarship can no longer be paid. To be honest, my young friend, your scholarship has never been paid. Your first month’s check never arrived, so I paid your fees out of my own pocket, thinking there must have been some temporary delay.” He paused, glancing at Professor Perret, who was watching as Vago delivered the news in Hungarian. “Monsieur Perret doesn’t know where the money came from, and need not know, so please don’t betray surprise. I told him everything was fine. However, I’m not a rich man, and, though I wish I could, I can’t pay your tuition and fees another month.”
An ice floe ascended through Andras’s chest, slow and cold. His tuition could no longer be paid. His tuition had never been paid. All at once he understood Perret’s kindness and regret.
“We think you’re a bright student,” Perret said in French. “We don’t want to lose you. Can your family help?”
“My family?” Andras’s voice sounded thready and vague in the high-ceilinged room. He saw his father stacking oak planks in the lumberyard, his mother cooking potato paprikás at the stove in the outdoor kitchen. He thought of the pair of gray silk stockings, the ones he’d given her ten years earlier for Chanukah-how she’d folded them into a chaste square and stored them in their paper wrapping, and had worn them only to synagogue. “My family doesn’t have that kind of money,” he said.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Perret said. “I wish there were something we could do. Before the depression we gave out a great many scholarships, but now…” He looked out the window at the low clouds and stroked his military beard. “Your expenses are paid until the end of the month. We’ll see what we can do before then, but I’m afraid I can’t offer much hope.”
Andras translated the words in his mind: not much hope.
“As for your brother,” Vago said, “it’s a damned shame. Turano wanted very much to help him.”
He tried to shake himself from the shock that had come over him. It was important that they understand about Tibor, about the money. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “The scholarship doesn’t matter-for Tibor, I mean. He’s been putting money away for six years. He’s got to have enough for the train ticket and his first year’s tuition. I’ll cable him tonight. Can your friend’s father hold the place for him?”
“I’d imagine so,” Vago said. “I’ll write to him at once, if you think it’s possible. But perhaps your brother can help you, too, if he’s got some money put away.”
Andras shook his head. “I can’t tell him. He hasn’t saved enough for both of us.”
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Perret said again, coming forward to shake Andras’s hand. “Professor Vago tells me you’re a resourceful young man. Perhaps you’ll find a way through this. I’ll see what I can do on our side.”
This was the first time Perret had touched him. It was as though Andras had just been told he had a terminal disease, as though the shadow of impending death had allowed Perret to dispense with formalities. He clapped Andras on the back as he led him to the door of the office. “Courage,” he said, giving Andras a salute, and turned him out into the hall.
Andras went down through the dusty yellow light of the staircase, past the classroom where his Gare d’Orsay drawing lay abandoned on the table, past the beautiful Lucia in the front office, and through the blue doors of the school he had come to think of as his own. He walked down the boulevard Raspail until he reached a post office, where he asked for a telegraph blank. On the narrow blue lines he wrote the message he’d composed on the way: POSITION SECURED FOR YOU AT MEDICAL COLLEGE MODENA, GRATIAS FRIEND OF VAGO. OBTAIN PASSPORT AND VISAS AT ONCE. HURRAH! For a moment, in a fog of self-pity, he considered omitting the HURRAH. But at the last moment he included it, paying the extra ten centimes, and then walked out onto the boulevard again. The cars continued to speed by, the afternoon light fell just as it always fell, the pedestrians on the street rushed by with their groceries and drawings and books, all the city insensible to what had just taken place in an office at the École Spéciale.
Unseeing, unthinking, he walked the narrow curve of the rue de Fleurus toward the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he found a green bench in the shade of a plane tree. The bench was within sight of the bee farm, and Andras could see the hooded beekeeper checking the layers of a hive. The beekeeper’s head and arms and legs were speckled with black bees. Slow-moving, torpid with smoke, they roamed the beekeeper’s body like cows grazing a pasture. In school, Andras had learned that there were bees who could change their nature when conditions demanded it. When a queen bee died, another bee could become the queen; that bee would shed its former life, take on a new body, a different role. Now she would lay eggs and converse about the health of the hive with her attendants. He, Andras, had been born a Jew, and had carried the mantle of that identity for twenty-two years. At eight days old he’d been circumcised. In the schoolyard he’d withstood the taunts of Christian children, and in the classroom his teachers’ disapproval when he’d had to miss school on Shabbos. On Yom Kippur he’d fasted; on Shabbos he’d gone to synagogue; at thirteen he’d read from the Torah and become a man, according to Jewish law. In Debrecen he went to the Jewish gimnázium, and after he graduated he’d taken a job at a Jewish magazine. He’d lived with Tibor in the Jewish Quarter of Budapest and had gone with him to the Dohány Street Synagogue. He’d met the ghost of Numerus Clausus, had left his home and his family to come to Paris. Even here there were men like Lemarque, and student groups that demonstrated against Jews, and more than a few anti-Semitic newspapers. And now he had this new weight to bear, this new tsuris. For a moment, as he sat on his bench at the Jardin du Luxembourg, he wondered what it would be like to leave his Jewish self behind, to shrug off the garment of his religion like a coat that had become too heavy in hot weather. He remembered standing in the Sainte-Chapelle in September, the holiness and the stillness of the place, the few lines he knew from the Latin mass drifting through his mind: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison. Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy.
For a moment it seemed simple, clear: become a Christian, and not just a Christian-a Roman Catholic, like the Christians who’d imagined Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, the Mátyás Templom and the Basilica of Szent István in Budapest. Shed his former life, take on a new history. Receive what had been withheld from him. Receive mercy.
But when he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child. He’d prayed for it every year at synagogue in Konyár on the eve of Yom Kippur. He had asked to be forgiven, had fasted, had come away at the end of Yom Kippur with a sense of having been scraped clean. Every year he’d felt the need to hold his soul to account, to forgive and be forgiven. Every year his brothers had flanked him in synagogue-Mátyás small and fierce on his left, Tibor lean and deep-voiced on his right. Beside them was their father in his familiar tallis, and behind the women’s partition, their mother-patient, forbearing, firm, her presence certain even when they could not see her. He could no sooner cease being Jewish than he could cease being a brother to his brothers, a son to his father and mother.
He stood, giving a last look to the beekeeper and his bees, and set off across the park toward home. He was thinking now not of what had happened but of what he was going to have to do next: find a job, a way of making the money it would take to stay in school. He wasn’t French, of course, but that didn’t matter; in Budapest, thousands of workers were paid under the table and no one was the wiser. Tomorrow was Saturday. Offices would be closed, but shops and restaurants would be open-bakeries, groceries, bookshops, art-supply stores, brasseries, men’s clothiers. If Tibor could work full-time in a shoe store and study his anatomy books at night, then Andras could work and go to school. By the time he had reached the rue des Écoles, he was already framing the necessary phrase in his head: I’m looking for a job. In Hungarian, Állást keresek. In French, Je cherche…je cherche… a job. He knew the word: un boulot.