He touched her shoulder. She opened her gray eyes and looked at him. “What is it?” she said. She sat up and held the eiderdown against herself. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing’s happened,” he said, sitting down beside her. “I’ve just been thinking about what’s to happen after.”

“Oh, Andras,” she said, and smiled drowsily. “Not that. That’s my least favorite subject at the moment.”

This was the way it had gone, anytime either of them had introduced the topic over the past week or so; they had turned it aside, allowed it to drift away as they drifted into another series of pleasures. It was easy enough to do; their real lives had come to seem far less real than the one they were leading together on the rue de Sévigné. But now their time was nearly finished. They couldn’t avoid the subject any longer.

“We have six more hours,” he said. “Then our lives begin again.”

She slipped her arms around him. “I know.”

“I want to have everything with you,” he said. “A real life. God help me! I want you beside me at night, every night. I want to have a child with you.” He had not yet said these things aloud; he could feel the blood rushing to his skin as he spoke.

Klara was silent for a long moment. She dropped her arms, sat back against the pillows, put her hand in his. “I have a child already,” she said.

“Elisabet’s not a child.” But those vulnerable shoes at the bottom of the closet. The painted box on the dresser. The hidden cigarettes.

“She’s my daughter,” Klara said. “She’s what I’ve lived for these sixteen years. I can’t just take up another life.”

“I know. But I can’t not see you, either.”

“Perhaps it would be best, though,” she said, and looked away from him. Her voice had fallen almost to a whisper. “Perhaps it would be best to stop with what we’ve had. Our lives may spoil it.”

But what would his life be without her, now that he knew what it was to be with her? He wanted to weep, or to take her by the shoulders and shake her. “Is that what you’ve thought all along?” he said. “That this was a lark? That when our lives began again it would be over?”

“I didn’t think about what would happen,” she said. “I didn’t want to. But we’ve got to think about it now.”

He got out of bed and took his shirt and trousers from a chair. He couldn’t look at her. “What good will that do?” he said. “You’ve already decided it’s impossible.”

“Please, Andras,” she said. “Don’t go.”

“Why should I stay?”

“Don’t be angry at me. Don’t leave like that.”

“I’m not angry,” he said. But he finished dressing, then retrieved his suitcase from beneath the bed and began to pack the few articles of clothing he’d brought from the rue des Écoles.

“There are things you don’t know about me,” she said. “Things that might frighten you, or change the way you felt.”

“That’s right,” he said. “And there’s a great deal you don’t know about me. But what does that matter now?”

“Don’t be cruel to me,” she said. “I’m as unhappy as you are.”

He wanted to believe that it was true, but it couldn’t have been; he’d laid himself open before her and she’d withdrawn from him. He put his last few things in the suitcase and snapped the latches, then went into the hallway and took his coat from the rack. She followed him to the top of the stairs, where she stood barefoot and bare-shouldered, the sheet wrapped around her as though she were a Greek sculpture. He buttoned his coat. He couldn’t believe he was going to walk down the stairs and through the door, not knowing when he’d see her again. He put a hand to her arm. Touched her shoulder. Tugged a corner of the sheet so that it fell from her body. In the dim hallway she stood naked before him. He couldn’t bear to look at her, couldn’t bear to touch or kiss her. And so he did what a moment before had seemed unimaginable: He descended the stairs, past the eyes of all those child dancers in their ethereal costumes, opened the door, and left her.

PART TWO. Broken Glass

CHAPTER TWELVE. What Happened at the Studio

CLASSES BEGAN the first Monday of January with a two-day charrette. Within a span of forty-eight hours they had to design a freestanding living space of fifty meters square, with a movable wall, two windows, a bath, a galley kitchen. They would submit a front elevation of the building, a floor plan, and a model. Forty-eight hours, during which anyone who cared about the project wouldn’t eat a meal or sleep or leave the studio. Andras took the project like an oblivion drug, felt the crush of time in his veins, willed it to make him forget his ten days with Klara. He bent over the plane of his worktable and made it the landscape of his mind. The Gare d’Orsay critique had left its imprint; he vowed that he would not be humiliated before the rest of the class, before that smug Lemarque and the ranks of the upperclassmen. Toward the end of his thirtieth waking hour he looked at his design and found that what he’d drawn was his parents’ house in Konyár, with a few details changed. One bedroom, not two. An indoor bath instead of the tin tub and outhouse. A modern indoor kitchen. One external wall had become a movable wall; it could be opened in summer to let the house communicate with the garden. The façade was plain and white with a many-paned window. On his second sleepless night he drew the movable wall as a curve; when it was open it would make a shady niche. He drew a stone bench in the garden, a circular reflecting pool. His parents’ house made over into a country retreat. He feared it was absurd, that everyone would see it for what it was: a Hajdú boy’s design, rude and primitive. He turned it in at the last minute and received, to his surprise, an appreciative nod and a paragraph of closely written praise from Vago, and the grudging approval of even the harshest fifth-year students.

At the Bernhardt they struck the set of The Mother and held auditions for Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna. Though Zoltán Novak pleaded, Madame Gérard would not take a role in the new play; she’d already been offered the role of Lady Macbeth at the Thêátre des Ambassadeurs, and Novak couldn’t pay her what they would. Andras was grateful for her impending departure. He couldn’t look at her without thinking of Klara, without wondering whether Madame Gérard knew what had happened between them. The day before she departed for the Ambassadeurs he helped her box up her dressing room: her Chinese robe, her tea things, her makeup, a thousand fan letters and postcards and little presents. As they worked she told him about the members of the new company she would join, two of whom had been featured in American films, and one of whom had appeared with Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet. He found it difficult to pay attention. He wanted to tell her what had happened. He had told no one; even to have told his friends at school would have reduced it somehow, made it seem a superficial and fleeting liaison. But Madame Gérard knew Klara; she would know what it meant. She might even be able to offer some hope. So he closed the dressing-room door and confessed it all, omitting only the revelation about the letter.

Madame Gérard listened gravely. When he’d finished, she got to her feet and paced the green rug in front of the dressing-room mirror as if bringing a monologue to mind. At last she turned and put her hands on the backrest of her makeup chair. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew, and I ought to have said something. When I saw you at the Bois de Vincennes, I knew. You didn’t care at all for the girl. You looked only at Klara. I’ll admit,” and she turned her eyes from him, laughing ruefully to herself, “old as I am, I was a little jealous. But I never thought you’d act upon your feelings.”

Andras rubbed his palms against his thighs. “I shouldn’t have,” he said.