“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.

“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.

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.”