At the end of the last page, written in a calmer hand-as if Mátyás had set the letter aside for a time, then come back to finish it once his anger had burned out-was a remorseful Hope you’re well. Andras gave a short, exhausted laugh. Hope you’re well! He might as well have written “Hope you die.”

Andras took up a sheet of paper from the desk. Dear Mátyás, he wrote. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been wretched a hundred times since I’ve been here. I’m wretched right now. Believe me when I tell you it hasn’t all been wonderful. As for you, I haven’t the slightest doubt that you will finish your bac and go to America, if that’s what you want (though I’d much rather you came here to Paris). I don’t expect you to take over for Apa, and neither does Apa himself. He wants you to finish your studies. But Mátyás was right to raise the question, right to be angry that there was no easy solution. He thought of Claire Morgenstern saying of her own mother, It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, a very long time. How her expression had clouded, how her eyes had filled with a grief that seemed to echo the grief he’d witnessed in her mother’s features. What had parted them, and what had kept Madame Morgenstern away? With effort he turned his thoughts back to his letter. I hope you won’t be angry with me for long, Mátyáska, but your anger does you credit: It’s evidence of what a good son you are. When I finish my studies I’ll go back to Hungary, and may God keep Anya and Apa in health long enough for me to be of service to them then. In the meantime he would worry about them just as his brothers did. In the meantime I expect you to be brilliant and fearless in all things, as ever! With love, your ANDRAS.

He posted the reply the next morning, hoping that the day would bring word from Madame Morgenstern. But there was no letter on the hall table that night when he returned from work. And why should he have expected her to write? he wondered. Their social exchange was complete. He had accepted Madame Morgenstern’s hospitality and had sent his thanks. If he’d imagined a connection with her, he had been mistaken. And in any case he was supposed to have made a connection with her daughter, not with Madame Morgenstern herself. That night he lay awake shivering and thinking of her and cursing himself for his ridiculous hope. In the morning he found a thin layer of ice in the washbasin; he broke it with the washcloth and splashed his face with a burning sheet of ice-cold water. Outside, a stiff wind blew loose shingles off the roof and shattered them in the street. At the bakery the woman gave him hot peasant loaves straight from the oven, charging him as if they were day-old bread. It was going to be one of the coldest winters ever, she told him. Andras knew he would need a warmer coat, a woolen scarf; his boots would need to be resoled. He didn’t have the money for any of it.

All week the temperature kept falling. At school the radiators emitted a feeble dry heat; the fifth-year students took places close to them, and the first-years froze by the windows. Andras spent hopeless hours on his model of the Gare d’Orsay, a train station already drifting into obsolescence. Though it still served as the terminus for the railways of southwestern France, its platforms were too short for the long trains used now. Last time he’d gone there to take measurements, the station had looked derelict and unkempt, a few of its high windows broken, a stippling of mildew darkening its line of arches. It didn’t cheer him to think he was preserving its memory in cardboard; his model was a flimsy homage to a tatterdemalion relic. On Friday he walked home alone, too dispirited to join the others at the Blue Dove-and there on the entry table was a white envelope with his name on it, the response he’d waited for all week. He tore it open in the foyer. Andras, you’re very welcome. Please visit us again sometime. Regards, C. MORGENSTERN. Nothing more. Nothing certain. Please visit us again sometime: What did that mean? He sat down on the stairs and dropped his forehead against his knees. All week he’d waited for this! Regards. His heart went on drumming in his chest, as if something wonderful were still about to happen. He tasted shame like a hot fragment of metal on his tongue.

After work that night he couldn’t bear the thought of going home to his tiny room, of lying down in the bed where he’d now spent five sleepless nights thinking about Claire Morgenstern. Instead he wandered toward the Marais, drawing his thin coat closer around him. It cheered him to take an unfamiliar path through the streets of the Right Bank; he liked losing his way and finding it again, discovering the strangely named alleyways and lanes-rue des Mauvais Garçons, rue des Guillemites, rue des Blancs-Manteaux. Tonight there was a smell of winter in the air, different from the Budapest smell of brown coal and approaching snow; the Paris smell was wetter and smokier and sweeter: chestnut leaves turning to mash in the gutters, the sugary brown scent of roasted nuts, the tang of gasoline from the boulevards. Everywhere there were posters advertising the ice-skating rinks, one in the Bois de Boulogne and another in the Bois de Vincennes. He hadn’t imagined that Paris would get cold enough for skating, but both sets of posters proclaimed that the ponds were frozen solid. One depicted a trio of spinning polar bears; the other showed a little girl in a short red skirt, her hands in a fur muff, one slender leg extended behind her.

In the rue des Rosiers a man and a woman stood beside one of these posters and kissed unabashedly, their hands buried inside each other’s coats. Andras was reminded of a game the children used to play in Konyár: Behind the baker’s shop there was a wall of white stone that was always warm because the baker’s oven was on the other side, and in the wintertime the boys would meet there after school to kiss the baker’s daughter. The baker’s daughter had pale brown freckles scattered across her nose like sesame seeds. For ten fillér she would press you up against the wall and kiss you until you couldn’t breathe. For five fillér you could watch her do it to someone else. She was saving for a pair of ice skates. Her name was Orsolya, but they never called her that; instead they called her Korcsolya, the word for ice skates. Andras had kissed her once, had felt her tongue explore his own as she held him up against the warm wall. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old; Orsolya must have been ten. Three of his friends from school were watching, cheering him on. Halfway through the kiss he’d opened his eyes. Orsolya, too, was open-eyed, but absent, her mind fixed elsewhere-perhaps on the ice skates. He’d never forgotten the day he came out of the house to see her skating on the pond, the silver flash at her soles like a teasing wink, a steely goodbye-forever to paid kissing. That winter she’d nearly died of cold, skating in all weather. “That girl will go through the ice,” Andras’s mother had predicted, watching Orsolya tracing loops in an early March rain. But she hadn’t gone through the ice. She’d survived her winter on the millpond, and the next winter she was there again, and the one after that she’d gone away to secondary school. He could see her now, a red-skirted figure through a gray haze, untouchable and alone.

Now he made his way though the grotto of medieval streets toward the rue de Sévigné, toward Madame Morgenstern’s building. He hadn’t decided to come here, but here he was; he stood on the sidewalk opposite and rocked on his heels. It was near midnight, and all the lights were out upstairs. But he crossed the street and looked over the demi-curtains into the darkened studio. There was the morning-glory horn of the phonograph, gleaming black and brutal in a corner; there was the piano with its flat toothy grimace. He shivered inside his coat and imagined the pink-clad forms of girls moving across the yellow plane of the studio floor. It was bitterly, blindingly cold. What was he doing out here on the street at midnight? There was only one explanation for his behavior: He’d gone mad. The pressure of his life here, of his single chance at making a man and an artist of himself, had proved too much for him. He put his head against the wall of the entryway, trying to slow his breathing; after a moment, he told himself, he would shake off this madness and find his way home. But then he raised his eyes and saw what he hadn’t known he’d been looking for: There in the entryway was a slim glass-fronted case of the kind used to post menus outside restaurants; instead of a menu, this one held a white rectangle of cardstock inscribed with the legend Horaire des Classes.