CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Visitor

ANDRAS HADN’T BEEN back to the Gare du Nord since he’d arrived from Budapest in September. Now, in late January, as he stood on the platform waiting for Tibor’s train, it amazed him to consider the bulk of ignorance he’d hauled to Paris those few months ago. He’d known almost nothing about architecture. Nothing about the city. Less than nothing about love. He had never touched a woman’s naked body. Hadn’t known French. Those SORTIE signs above the exits might as well have said YOU IDIOT! The past days’ events had only served to remind him how little he still knew of the world. He felt he was just beginning to sense the scope of his own inexperience, his own benightedness; he had scarcely begun to allay it. He’d hoped that by the time he saw his brother again he might feel more like a man, like someone conversant with the wider world. But there was nothing more he could do about that now. Tibor would have to take him as he was.

At a quarter past five the Western Europe Express pulled into the station, filling that glass-and-iron cavern with the screech of brakes. Porters lowered the steps and climbed down; passengers poured forth, men and women haggard from traveling all night. Young men his age, sleepless and uncertain-looking in the wintry light of the station, squinted at the signs and searched for their baggage. Andras scanned the faces of the passengers. As more and more of them passed without a sign of Tibor, he had a moment of fear that his brother had decided not to come after all. And then someone put a hand on his shoulder, and he turned, and there was Tibor Lévi on the platform of the Gare du Nord.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Tibor said, and pulled Andras close.

A carbonated joy rose up in Andras’s chest, a dreamlike sense of relief. He held his brother at arm’s length. Tibor scrutinized Andras from head to toe, his gaze coming to rest on Andras’s hole-ridden shoes.

“It’s a good thing you have a brother who’s a shoe clerk,” he said. “Or was one. Those filthy oxfords wouldn’t have lasted you another week.”

They retrieved Tibor’s bags and took a cab to the Latin Quarter, a trip Andras found surprisingly brief and direct, and he grasped how pro-foundry his first Parisian cab driver had cheated him. The streets flashed past almost too quickly; he wanted to show Tibor everything at once. They flew down the boulevard de Sébastopol and over the Île de la Cité, and were turning onto the rue des Écoles in what felt like an instant. The Latin Quarter crouched beneath a haze of rain, its sidewalks crowded with umbrellas. They rushed Tibor’s bags through the drizzle and dragged them upstairs. When they reached Andras’s garret, Tibor stood in the doorway and laughed.

“What?” Andras said. He was proud of his shabby room.

“It’s exactly as I imagined,” Tibor said. “Down to the last detail.”

Under his gaze the Paris apartment seemed to come fully into Andras’s possession perhaps for the first time, as if his seeing it made it continuous with the places Andras had lived before, with the life he had led before he climbed onto a train at Nyugati Station in September. “Come in,” Andras said. “Take off your coat. Let me make a fire.”

Tibor took off his coat, but he wouldn’t let Andras make the fire. It couldn’t have mattered less that this was Andras’s apartment, nor that Tibor had been traveling for three days. This was how it had always been between them: The older took care of the younger. If this had been Mátyás’s apartment and Andras had been there to visit, Andras would have been the one cracking the kindling and piling the paper beneath the logs. In a few minutes Tibor had conjured a steady blaze. Only then would he take off his shoes and crawl into Andras’s bed.

“What a relief!” he said. “It’s been three days since I slept lying down.” He pulled the coverlet over himself and in another moment he was asleep.

Andras set up his books on the table and tried to study, but found he couldn’t concentrate. He wanted news of Mátyás and his parents. And he wanted news of Budapest -not of its politics or its problems, which anyone could read about in the Hungarian dailies, but of the neighborhood where they’d lived, the people they knew, the innumerable small changes that marked the flow of time. He wanted, too, to tell Tibor what had happened to Polaner, whom he’d seen again that morning. Polaner had looked even worse than before, swollen and livid and feverish. His breath had grated in his throat, and the nurses had bent over him with dressings for his bruises and doses of fluids to raise his blood pressure. A team of doctors gathered at the foot of his bed and debated the risks and benefits of surgery. The signs of internal bleeding persisted, but the doctors couldn’t agree whether it was best to operate or whether the bleeding would stop on its own. Andras tried to decode their quick medical patter, tried to piece through the puzzle of French anatomical terms, but he couldn’t grasp everything, and his fear prevented him from asking questions. It was horrible to think of Polaner cut open, and even worse to think of the bleeding unstinted inside him. Andras had stayed until Professor Vago arrived to take over the watch; he didn’t want Polaner to wake and find himself alone. Ben Yakov hadn’t made an appearance that morning, and no one had heard from Rosen since he’d left the hospital in search of Lemarque.

Now he forced himself to look at his textbook: a list of statics problems swarming in an antlike blur. He willed the numbers and letters into an intelligible order, penciled neat columns of figures onto a clean sheet of graph paper. He calculated the force vectors acting upon fifty steel rods in a load-bearing wall of reinforced concrete, located the points of highest tension along a cathedral buttress, estimated the wind sway of a hypothetical steel structure twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Each building with its quiet internal math, the numbers floating within the structures. An hour passed as he made his way through the list of problems. At last Tibor groaned and sat up in bed.

“Orrh,” he said. “Am I still in Paris?”

“I’m afraid so,” Andras said.

Tibor insisted on taking Andras to dinner. They went to a Basque restaurant that was supposed to serve good oxtail soup. The waiter was a broad-shouldered bully who banged the plates onto the tables and shouted curses at the kitchen. The soup was thin, the meat overcooked, but they drank Basque beer that made Andras feel flushed and sentimental. Here was his brother at last, here they were together, dining in a foreign city like the grown men they’d become. Their mother would have laughed aloud to see them together in this mannish restaurant, leaning over their mugs of ale.

“Be honest,” Andras said. “How’s Anya? Her letters are too cheerful. I’m afraid she wouldn’t tell me if something were wrong.”

“I went to Konyár the weekend before I left,” Tibor said. “Mátyás was there, too. Anya’s trying to convince Apa to move to Debrecen for the winter. She wants him close to a good doctor if he gets pneumonia again. He won’t go, of course. He insists he won’t get sick, as though he had any control over that. And when I take Anya’s side, he asks me who I think I am to tell him what to do. You’re not a doctor yet, Tibi, he says. And he shakes his finger at me.”

Andras laughed, though he knew it was a serious matter; they both knew how ill their father had been, and how their mother relied on him. “What will they do?”

“Stay in Konyár, for now.”

“And Mátyás?”

Tibor shook his head. “A strange thing happened the night before I left. Matyás and I went walking out to the rail bridge above that creek, the one where we used to catch minnows in the summer.”

“I know the one,” Andras said.

“It was a cold night to be out walking. The bridge was icy. We never should have been up there in the first place. Well, we stood there for a while looking at the stars, and we started talking about Anya and Apa, about what Mátyás might have to do if something happened to them, and he was angry at me, you know-I was leaving him to handle everything alone, he said. I tried to tell him they’d be fine, and that if anything truly bad happened, you and I would come home, and he said we’d never come home, that you were gone for good and that I would be soon. We were having this argument above that frozen creek, and then we heard a train coming.”