Andras took a swallow of whiskey and felt the false warmth of it move through his chest. “What will you do?” he said.

“What will you do?” Novak said. “And what will the actors do? And Madame Courbet? And Claudel, and Pély, and all the others? It’s a disaster. We’re not the only ones, either. They’re closing four theaters.” He sat back in his chair and stroked his moustache with one finger, his eyes moving over the bookshelves. “The fact is, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Madame Novak is in a delicate condition, as they say. She’s been pining for her parents in Budapest. I’m sure she’ll take this as a sign that we should return home.”

“But you’d rather stay,” Andras said.

Novak released a sigh from the broad bellows of his chest. “I understand how Edith feels. This isn’t our home. We’ve scratched out our little corner here, but none of it belongs to us. We’re Hungarians, in the end, not French.”

“When I met you in Vienna, I thought no man could look more Parisian.”

“Now you see how green you were,” Novak said, and smiled sadly. “But what about you? I know you’ve got your school fees to pay.”

Andras told him about the offer of an assistantship with the set designer, Monsieur Forestier, and how he’d just been coming to ask Novak’s advice on the matter.

Novak brought his hands together, a single beat of applause. “It would have been a terrible shame to lose you,” he said. “But it’s an excellent chance, and well timed. You’ve got to do it, of course.”

“I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done,” Andras said.

“You’re a good young man. You’ve worked hard here. I’ve never regretted taking you on.” He drained the rest of his drink and pushed the empty glass across the desk. “Now, would you fill that again for me? I’ve got to go break the news to the others. You’ll come to work tomorrow, I hope. There’ll be a great deal to do, getting this place closed down. You’ll have to tell Forestier I can’t release you until the end of the month.”

“Tomorrow, as usual,” Andras said.

He went home that evening with a frightening sense of vacancy in his chest. No more Sarah-Bernhardt. No more Monsieur Novak. No more Claudel, or Pély; no more Marcelle Gérard. And no more Klara, no more Klara. The hard white shell of his life punctured and blown clean. He was light now, hollow, an empty egg. Hollow and light, he drifted home through the January wind. At 34 rue des Écoles he climbed the flights and flights of stairs-how many hundreds of them were there?-feeling he didn’t have the energy to look at his books that night, nor even to wash his face or change for bed. He wanted only to lie down in his trousers and shoes and overcoat, pull the eiderdown over his head, ride out the hours before dawn. But at the top of the stairs he saw a line of light coming from beneath his own door, and when he put a hand on the doorknob he found it unlocked. He pushed the door open and let it swing. A fire in the grate; bread and wine on the table; in the single chair with a book in her hands, Klara.

“Te,” he said. You.

“And you,” she said.

“How did you get in?”

“I told the concierge it was your birthday. I said I was planning a surprise.”

“And what did you tell your daughter?”

She looked down at the cover of her book. “I told her I was going to see a friend.”

“What a shame that wasn’t true.”

She got to her feet, crossed the room to him, put her hands on his arms. “Please, Andras,” she said. “Don’t speak to me that way.”

He moved away from her and took off his coat, his scarf. For what felt like a long time he couldn’t say anything more; he went to the fireplace and crossed his arms, looking down into a faltering pyramid of bright coals. “It was bad enough, not knowing whether or not I’d see you again,” he said. “I told myself we were finished, but I couldn’t convince myself it was true. Finally I confided in Marcelle. She was kind enough to tell me I wasn’t alone in my misery. She said I belonged to an illustrious club of men you’d thrown over.”

Her gray eyes darkened. “Thrown over? Is that what you feel I’ve done to you?”

“Thrown over, jettisoned, sent packing. I don’t suppose it matters what you call it.”

“We decided it was impossible.”

“You decided.”

She went to him and moved her hands over his arms, and when she looked up into his face he saw there were tears in her eyes. To his horror his own eyes began to burn. This was Klara, whose name he’d carried with him from Budapest; Klara, whose voice came to him in his sleep.

“What do you want?” he said into her hair. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I’ve been miserable,” she said. “I can’t let it go. I want to know you, Andras.”

“And I want to know you,” he said. “I don’t like secrecy.” But he knew as he said it that what was hidden made her all the more attractive; there was a kind of torment in her unknowability, in the rooms that lay beyond the ones in which she entertained him.

“You’ll have to be patient with me,” she said. “You’ll have to let me trust you.”

“I can be patient,” he said. He had drawn her so close that the sharp crests of her pelvis pressed against him; he wanted to reach into her body and grab her by the bones. “Claire Morgenstern,” he said. “Klárika.” She would ruin him, he thought. But he could no sooner have sent her away than he could have dismissed geometry from architecture, or the cold from January, or the winter sky from outside his window. He bent to her and kissed her. Then, for the first time, he took her into his own bed.

When he stepped into the world the next morning it was a transformed place. The dullness of the weeks without her had fallen away. He had become human again, had reclaimed his own flesh and blood, and hers. Everything glittered too brilliantly in the winter sun; every detail of the street rushed at him as if he were seeing it for the first time. How had he never noticed the way light fell from the sky onto the bare limbs of the lindens outside his building, the way it broke and diffused on the wet paving stones and needled whitely from the polished brass handles of the doors along the street? He savored the bracing slap of his soles against the sidewalk, fell in love with the cascade of ice in the frozen fountain of the Luxembourg. He wanted to thank someone aloud for the fine long corridor of the boulevard Raspail, which conducted him every day along its row of Haussmann-era buildings to the blue doors of the École Spéciale. He adored the empty courtyard awash with winter sunlight, its green benches empty, its grass frozen, its paths wet with melted snow. A speckle-breasted bird on a branch pronounced her name exactly: Klara, Klara.

He ran upstairs to the studio and looked among the drawings for the new set of plans he’d been working on with Polaner. He thought he might spend a few minutes on them before he had to report to Vago for his morning French. But the plans weren’t there; Polaner must have taken them home with him. Instead he picked up the textbook of architectural vocabulary he would study that morning with Vago, and ran downstairs again for a stop at the men’s room. He pushed open the door into echoing dark and fumbled for the light switch. From the far corner of the room came a low wheezing groan.

Andras turned on the light. On the concrete floor, against the wall beyond the urinals and the sinks, someone was curled into a tight G. A small form, a man’s, in a velvet jacket. Beside him a set of plans, crumpled and boot-stomped.

“Polaner?”

That sound again. A wheeze sliding into a groan. And then his own name.

Andras went to him and knelt beside him on the concrete. Polaner wouldn’t look at Andras, or couldn’t. His face was dark with bruises, his nose broken, his eyes hidden in purple folds. He kept his knees tight against his chest.

“My God,” Andras said. “What happened? Who did this?”