“I won’t tell,” he said. “Upon my honor.”

Elisabet scowled at him, seeming to doubt his trustworthiness; but behind her hard look there was a flash of vulnerability, a consciousness that he held the key to something that mattered to her. Andras wasn’t certain whether it was Paul himself she loved, or whether it was simply the freedom to carry on a life beyond her mother’s scrutiny, but in either case he understood. He spoke his pledge again. Her tight-held shoulders relaxed a single degree, and she let out a truncated sigh. Then she fished a pair of coats from the pile on the bed, brushed past him into the hall, and returned to the front room, where Paul and Tibor were still watching the charades.

“It’s late, Paul,” Elisabet said, throwing his coat onto his lap. “Let’s go.”

“It’s early!” Paul said. “Come sit here with us and watch these girls.”

“I can’t. I have to get home.”

“Come to me, lioness,” he said, and took her wrist.

“If I have to go home alone, I will,” she said, and pulled away.

Paul got up from the sofa and kissed Elisabet on the mouth. “Stubborn girl,” he said. “I hope this gentleman wasn’t rude to you.” He gave Andras a wink.

“This gentleman has the deepest respect for the young lady,” Andras said.

Elisabet rolled her eyes. “All right,” she said. “That’s enough.” She shrugged into her coat, gave Andras a last warning look, and went to the door. Paul snapped a salute and followed her into the hallway.

“Well,” Tibor said. “I think you’d better sit down and tell me what that was all about.”

“She begged me not to tell her mother that I saw her with that man.”

“And what did you say?”

“I swore I’d never tell.”

“Not that you’d have the opportunity anyway.”

“Well,” Andras said. “It seems Elisabet has figured out what’s going on between her mother and me.”

“Ah. So the secret’s out.”

“That one is, anyway. She seemed not at all surprised. She said I was her mother’s type, whatever that means. But she doesn’t seem to have any idea that József’s her cousin.” He sighed. “Tibor, what in God’s name am I doing?”

“That’s just what I’ve been asking you,” Tibor said, and put an arm around Andras’s shoulders. A moment later József Hász appeared, three glasses of champagne in his hands. He passed them each a glass and toasted their health.

“Are you having fun?” he said. “Everyone must have fun.”

“Oh, yes,” Andras said, grateful for the champagne.

“I see you’ve met my American friend Paul,” József said. “His father’s an industrial chieftain. Automobile tires or some such thing. That new girlfriend of his is a little sharp-tongued for my taste, but he’s wild about her. Maybe he thinks that’s just the way French girls act.”

“If that’s the way French girls act, you gentlemen are in trouble,” Tibor said.

“Here’s to trouble,” József said, and they drained their glasses.

The next day Andras and Tibor walked the long halls of the Louvre, taking in the velvet-brown shadows of Rembrandt and the frivolous curlicues of Fragonard and the muscular curves of the classical marbles; then they strolled along the quais to the Pont d’Iéna and stood beneath the monumental arches of the Tower. They circumnavigated the Gare d’Orsay as Andras described how he’d built his model; finally they backtracked to the Luxembourg, where the apiary stood in silent hibernation. They sat with Polaner at the hospital as he slept through the nurses’ ministrations; Polaner, whose terrible story Andras hadn’t yet told Klara. They watched him sleep for nearly an hour. Andras wished he’d wake, wished he wouldn’t look so pale and still; the nurses said he was better that day, but Andras couldn’t see any change. Afterward they walked to the Sarah-Bernhardt, where Tibor lent a hand with the closing-down. They stowed the coffee things and folded the wooden table, cleared the actors’ pigeonholes of ancient messages, shuttled stray props to the prop room and costumes to the costume shop, where Madame Courbet was folding garments into her neatly labeled cabinets. Claudel gave Andras a half-full box of cigars-a former prop-and apologized for having told him so many times to burn in hell. He hoped Andras could forgive him, now that they’d both been cast upon the whims of fate.

Andras forgave him. “I know you didn’t mean any harm,” he said.

“That’s a good boy,” Claudel said, and kissed him on both cheeks. “He’s a good boy,” he told Tibor. “A darling.”

Monsieur Novak met them in the hallway as they were on their way out. He called them into his office, where he produced three cut-crystal glasses and poured out the last of a bottle of Tokaji. They toasted Tibor’s studies in Italy, and then they toasted the eventual reopening of the Sarah-Bernhardt and the three other theaters that were closing that week. “A city without theater is like a party without conversation,” Novak said. “No matter how good the food and drink are, people will find it dull. Aristophanes said that, I believe.”

“Thank you for keeping my brother out of the gutter,” Tibor said.

“Oh, he would have found a way without me,” Novak said, and put a hand on Andras’s shoulder.

“It was your umbrella that saved him,” Tibor said. “Otherwise he would have missed his train. And then he might have lost his nerve.”

“No, not him,” Novak said. “Not our Mr. Lévi. He would have been all right. And so will you, my young man, in Italy.” He shook Tibor’s hand and wished him luck.

It was dark by the time they left. They walked along the Quai de Gesvres as the lights of the bridges and barges shivered on the water. A wind tore through the river channel, flattening Andras’s coat against his back. He knew Klara was in her studio at that hour, teaching the final segment of her evening class. Without telling Tibor where they were going he steered them down the rue François Miron in the direction of the rue de Sévigné. He traced the route he hadn’t walked in weeks. And there on the corner, its light spilling into the street, was the dance studio with its demi-curtains, its sign that said MME. MORGENSTERN, MAÎTRESSE. The faint sound of phonograph music reached them through the glass: the slow, stately Schumann she used for the end-of-class révérences. This was a class of intermediate girls, slender ten-year-olds with downy napes, their shoulder blades like small sharp wings beneath the cotton of their leotards. At the front of the room Klara led them through a series of sweeping curtseys. Her hair was gathered into a loose roll at the base of her neck, and she wore a practice dress of plum-colored viscose, tied at the waist with a black ribbon. Her arms were supple and strong, her features tranquil. She needed no one; she had made a life, and here it was: these end-of-day révérences, her own daughter upstairs, Mrs. Apfel, the warm rooms of the flat she’d bought for herself. And yet from him, from Andras Lévi, a twenty-two-year-old student at the École Spéciale, she seemed to want something: the luxury of vulnerability, perhaps; the sharp thrill of uncertainty. As he watched, his heart seemed to go still in his chest.

“There she is,” he said. “Klara Morgenstern.”

“God,” Tibor said. “She’s beautiful, that’s for certain.”

“Let’s see if she’ll have dinner with us.”

“No, Andras. I’m not going to do it.”

“Why not?” he said. “You came here to see how I live, didn’t you? This is it. If you don’t meet her, you won’t know.”

Tibor watched as Klara lifted her arms; the children lifted their arms and swept into low curtseys.

“She’s tiny,” Tibor said. “She’s a wood nymph.”

Andras tried to see her as Tibor was seeing her-tried to see her for the first time. There was something fearless, something girlish, about the way she moved her body, as if part of her remained a child. But her eyes held the look of a woman who had seen one lifetime pass into another. That was what made her like a nymph, Andras thought: the way she seemed to embody both timelessness and the irrevocable passage of time. The music reached its end, and the girls rushed for their satchels and coats. Tibor and Andras watched them leave. Then they met Klara at the studio door, where she stood shivering in her practice dress.