“So we weren’t the only ones!” Rosen said, touching his ribs with his fingertips. Andras felt the inside of his lip with his tongue. His cheek still bled where his teeth had cut it, but the teeth were intact. At the sound of quick footsteps he looked up to see three members of the Ligue running down the street, their banners flapping. Other men chased them. Policemen chased the others.
“I’d love to see the look on that secretary’s face again,” Rosen said.
“You mean the Secretary to the President Himself?”
Rosen put his hands on his knees and laughed. But then an ambulance rushed down the street in the direction of the assembly hall, and a few moments later another followed. Not long afterward, more Ligue members passed; these looked pale and stricken, and they dragged their banners on the sidewalk and held their hats in their hands. Andras and Rosen watched them in silence. Something grave had happened: Someone from the Ligue had been hurt. Andras took off his own hat and held it on his lap, his adrenaline dissolving into hollow dread. Le Grand Occident wasn’t the only group of its kind; there had to be dozens of similar meetings taking place all over Paris that very minute. And if meetings like that were taking place in Paris, then what was going on in the less enlightened cities of Europe? Andras pulled his jacket tighter around himself, beginning to feel the cold again. Rosen got to his feet; he, too, had become quiet and serious.
“Far worse things are going to happen here,” he said. “Wait and see.”
On the rue de Sévigné the next day, Madame Morgenstern and Elisabet sat in silence as Andras described the incidents of the past forty-eight hours. He told them about the critique, and how far his work had fallen in his own estimation; he told them what had happened at the meeting. He produced a clipping from that morning’s L’Oeuvre and read it aloud. The article described the disrupted recruitment session and the melee that followed. Each group blamed the other for initiating the violence: Pemjean took the opportunity to point out the deviousness and belligerence of the Jewish people, and Gérard Lecache, president of the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisemitisme, called the incident a manifestation of Le Grand Occident’s violent intent. The newspaper abandoned all pretense of journalistic objectivity to praise the Maccabean bravery of the Ligue, and to accuse Le Grand Occident of bigotry, ignorance, and barbarism; two members of the Ligue, it turned out, had been beaten senseless and were now hospitalized at the Hôtel-Dieu.
“You might have been killed!” Elisabet said. Her tone was acidic as usual, but for an instant she gave him a look of what seemed like genuine concern. “What were you thinking? Did you imagine you’d take on all those brutes at once? Thirty of you against two hundred of them?”
“We weren’t part of the plan,” Andras said. “We didn’t know the LICA was going to be there. When they started making noise, we joined in.”
“Ridiculous fools, all of you,” Elisabet said.
Madame Morgenstern fixed her gray eyes upon Andras. “Take care you don’t get in trouble with the police,” she said. “Remember, you’re a guest in France. You don’t want to be deported because of an incident like this.”
“They wouldn’t deport me,” Andras said. “Not for serving the ideals of France.”
“They certainly would,” Madame Morgenstern said. “And that would be the end of your studies. Whatever you do, you must protect your status here. Your presence in France is a political statement to begin with.”
“He’ll never last here, anyway,” Elisabet said, the moment of concern having passed. “He’ll fail out of school by the end of the year. His professors think he’s talentless. Weren’t you listening?” She peeled herself from the velvet chair and slouched off to her bedroom, where they could hear her knocking around as she got ready to go out. A few moments later she emerged in an olive-green dress and a black wool cap. She’d braided her hair and scrubbed her cheeks into a windy redness. Pocketbook in one hand, gloves in the other, she stood in the sitting-room doorway and gave a half wave.
“Don’t wait up for me,” she told her mother. Then, as an apparent afterthought, she arrowed a look of disdain in Andras’s direction. “There’s no need to come next weekend, Champion of France,” she said. “I’ll be skiing with Marthe in Chamonix. In fact, I wish you’d desist altogether.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and ran down the stairs, and they heard the door slam and jingle behind her.
Madame Morgenstern lowered her forehead into her hand. “How much longer will she be like this, do you think? You weren’t like this when you were sixteen, were you?”
“Worse,” Andras said, and smiled. “But I didn’t live at home, so my mother was spared.”
“I’ve threatened to send her to boarding school, but she knows I don’t have the heart. Nor the money, for that matter.”
“Well,” he said. “Chamonix. How long will she be there?”
“Ten days,” she said. “The longest she’s been gone from home.”
“Then I suppose it’ll be January before I see you again,” Andras said. He heard himself say it aloud-maga, the singular Hungarian you-but by that time it was too late, and in any case Madame Morgenstern hadn’t seemed to notice the slip. With the excuse that it was time for him to go to work, he got up to take his coat and hat from the rack at the top of the stairs. But she stopped him with a hand on his sleeve.
“You’re forgetting the Spectacle d’Hiver,” she said. “You’ll come, won’t you?”
Her students’ winter recital. He knew it was next week, of course. It was to take place at the Sarah-Bernhardt on Thursday evening; he was the one who had designed the posters. But he hadn’t expected to have any excuse to attend. He wasn’t scheduled to work that night, since The Mother would already have closed for the holidays. Now Madame Morgenstern was looking at him in quiet anticipation, her hand burning through the fabric of his coat. His mouth was a desert, his hands glacial with sweat. He told himself that the invitation meant nothing, that it fell perfectly within the bounds of their acquaintance: as a friend of the family, as a possible suitor of Elisabet, he might well be asked to come. He mustered a response in the affirmative, saying he’d be honored, and they executed their weekly parting ritual: the coat-rack, his things, the stairs, a chaste goodbye. But at the threshold she held his gaze a moment longer than usual. Her eyebrows came together, and she held her mouth in its pensive pose. Just as she seemed about to speak, a pair of red-jacketed schoolgirls ran down the sidewalk chasing a little white dog, and they had to move apart, and the moment passed. She raised a hand in farewell and stepped inside, closing the door behind her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. Winter Holiday
THAT YEAR, in her studio on the rue de Sévigné, Claire Morgenstern had taught some ninety-five girls between the ages of eight and fourteen, three of the oldest of whom would soon depart for professional training with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. She had been preparing the children for the Spectacle d’Hiver for two months now; the costumes were ready, the young dancers schooled in the ways of snowflakes, sugarplums, and swans, the winter-garden scenery in readiness. That week Andras’s advertising poster appeared all over town: a snowflake child in silhouette against a starry winter sky, one leg extended in an arabesque, the words Spectacle d’Hiver trailing the upraised right hand like a comet tail. Every time he saw it-on the way to school, on the wall opposite the Blue Dove, at the bakery-he heard Madame Morgenstern saying You’ll come, won’t you?
By Wednesday, the evening of the dress rehearsal, he felt he couldn’t wait another day to see her. He arrived at the Sarah-Bernhardt at his usual hour, carrying a large plum cake for the coffee table. The corridors backstage were thronged with girls in white and silver tulle; they surged around him, blizzardlike, as he slipped into the backstage corner where the coffee table was arranged. With his pocketknife he cut the plum cake into a raft of little pieces. A group of girls in snowflake costumes clustered at the edges of the curtain, waiting for their entrance. As they tiptoed in place, they cast interested glances at the coffee table and the cake. Andras could hear a stage manager calling for the next group of dancers. Madame Morgenstern-Klara, as Madame Gérard called her-was nowhere to be seen.