Yours sincerely,
ANDRAS LÉVI
He read and reread the draft, wondering if he should try to write in French instead of Hungarian; finally he decided he was likely to make an imbecillic error in French. He wrote a fair copy on a sheet of thin white paper, which he folded in half and sealed into an envelope before he could begin to reexamine every line. Then he mailed the letter at the same blue box where he’d posted the letter from her mother.
That week he was grateful for the hard, painstaking work of model-building. In the studio he cut a rectangle of thick pasteboard to serve as a base for the model, and he traced the footprint of the building onto the base in a thin pencil line. On another piece of pasteboard he drew the shapes of the building’s four elevations, working meticulously from his measured drawing. His favorite tool was a ruler of near-transparent cellulose through which he could see the pencil lines that intersected the one he was drawing; that ruler, with its strict grid of millimeters, was an island of exactitude in the sea of tasks he had to complete, a strip of certainty in the midst of his uncertainty. Every piece of the model had to be made from sturdy material that could not be bought at a discount or substituted with flimsy stuff; everyone recalled what had happened during the first week of classes, when Polaner, trying to stretch his dwindling supply of francs, had used Bristol paper for a model, rather than pasteboard. In the middle of the critique, when Professor Vago had tapped the roof of Polaner’s model with his mechanical pencil, one wall had buckled and sent the paper chateau to its knees. Pasteboard was expensive; Andras could not afford to make a mistake, neither in the ink drawing nor the cutting. It provided some comfort to work alongside Rosen and Ben Yakov and Polaner, who were building the École Militaire, the Rotonde de la Villette, and the Théâtre de l’Odéon, respectively. Even smug Lemarque provided a welcome distraction; he’d decided to build a model of the twenty-sided Cirque d’Hiver, and could be heard periodically swearing as he traced wall after wall onto pasteboard.
In statics class there was the clear plain order of math: the three-variable equation to calculate the number and thickness of steel rods per cubic meter of concrete, the number of kilograms a support column could bear, the precise distribution of pressure along the crown of an arch. At the front of the classroom, chalking his way through a maze of calculations on the chip-edged blackboard, stood the wildly untidy Victor Le Bourgeois, professor of statics, a practicing architect and engineer, who, like Vago, was said to be a close friend of Pingusson’s. His disorder expressed itself in trousers torn at the knee, a jacket permanently grayed with chalk dust, a shaggy halo of ginger-colored hair, and a tendency to misplace the blackboard eraser. But when he began to trace the relationship between mathematical abstractions and tangible building materials, all the chaos of his person seemed to drop away. Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.
At the theater there was the relief of being able to speak her name aloud to Madame Gérard. During intermission at the Tuesday night performance, Andras brought Madame a cup of strong coffee and waited by the door of her dressing room as she drank it. She looked up from under the graceful arch of her brows; she was stately even in the soot-stained apron and head kerchief of the Mother. “I haven’t had word from Madame Morgenstern,” she said. “How was your luncheon?”
“Quite pleasance,” Andras said, and blushed. “Pleasant, I mean.”
“Quite pleasant, he says.”
“Yes,” Andras said. “Quite.” His French vocabulary seemed to have fled.
“Aha,” said Madame Gérard, as if she understood entirely. Andras’s blush deepened: He knew she must think that something had passed between himself and Elisabet. Something had, of course, though not at all what she must have imagined.
“Madame Morgenstern is very kind,” he said.
“And Mademoiselle?”
“Mademoiselle is very…” Andras swallowed and looked at the row of lights above Madame Gérard’s mirror. “Mademoiselle is very tall.”
Madame Gérard threw her head back and laughed. “Very tall!” she said. “Indeed. And very strong-willed. I knew her when she was a little girl playing at dolls; she used to speak to them so imperiously I thought they would burst into tears. But you mustn’t be scared of Elisabet. She’s harmless, I assure you.”
Before Andras could protest that he wasn’t in the least afraid of Elisabet, the double bell sounded to signal the impending end of intermission. Madame had a costume change to complete, and Andras had to leave to finish his tasks before the third act began. Once the actors went on again, time slowed to a polar trickle. All he could think of was the letter he’d written and when a response might come. His letter might have been delivered by that afternoon’s post, and she might have posted her own response today. Her letter could arrive as soon as tomorrow. It wasn’t unreasonable to think she might invite him for lunch again that weekend.
The next night, when the play finally ended and Andras had finished his duties for the evening, he ran all the way home to the rue des Écoles. In his mind he could see the envelope glowing in the dark of the entryway, the cream-colored stationery, Madame Morgenstern’s neat, even handwriting, the same handwriting in which she’d made the inscriptions beneath the postcards in her album. From Marie in Morocco. From Marcel in Rome. Who was Marcel, Andras wondered, and what had he written from Rome?
As he opened the tall red door with his skeleton key, he could already make out an envelope on the console table. He let the door swing behind him as he went for the letter. But it wasn’t the cream-colored lilac-scented envelope he’d hoped for; it was a wrinkled brown envelope addressed in the handwriting of his brother Mátyás. Unlike Tibor, Mátyás rarely wrote; when he did, the letters were thin and informational. This one was thick, requiring twice the usual amount of postage. His first thought was that something had happened to his parents-his father had been injured, his mother had caught influenza-and his second thought was of how ridiculous he’d been to expect a letter from Madame Morgenstern.
Upstairs he lit one of his precious candles and sat down at the table. He slit the brown envelope carefully with his penknife. Inside was a creased sheaf of pages, five of them, the longest letter Mátyás had ever written to him. The handwriting was large and careless and peppered with inkblots. Andras scanned the first lines for bad news about his parents, but there wasn’t any. If there had been, Andras thought, Tibor would have wired him. This letter was about Mátyás himself. Mátyás had learned that Andras had arranged for Tibor to enter medical school in January. Congratulations to them both, to Andras for having successfully exploited his lofty connections, and to Tibor for getting to leave Hungary at last. Now he, Mátyás, would certainly have to remain behind, alone, heir by default to a rural lumberyard. Did Andras think it was easy, having to hear their parents talk about how exciting Andras’s studies were, how well he was doing in his classes, how wonderful it was that Tibor could now study to become a doctor, what a fine couple of sons they were? Had Andras forgotten that Mátyás, too, might have hopes for his own studies abroad? Had Andras forgotten everything Mátyás had said on the subject? Did Andras think Mátyás was going to give up on his own plans? If he did, he’d better reconsider. Mátyás was saving money. If he saved enough before he graduated, he wouldn’t bother with his bac. He would run away to America, to New York, and go on the stage. He’d find a way to get by. In America all you needed was determination and the willingness to work. And once he left Hungary, it would be up to Andras and Tibor to worry about the lumberyard and their parents, because he, Mátyás, would never return.