“Remember those huts you used to build in Konyár?” Tibor said. “Your housing business?”

The housing business. The summer he turned nine, just before he’d started school in Debrecen, he had become a building contractor for the neighborhood boys. He had a monopoly on scrap wood, and could build a fort or clubhouse in half a day. Four-year-old Mátyás was his assistant. Mátyás would come along on the jobs and solemnly hand nails to Andras as Andras pounded the huts together. In return for his building services, Andras collected whatever the boys had to offer: a photograph of someone’s father in a soldier’s uniform, a fleet of tiny tin warplanes, a cat’s skull, a balsa boat, a white mouse in a cage. That summer he had been the richest boy in town.

“Remember my mouse?” Andras said. “Remember what you used to call him?”

“Eliahu ha Navi.”

“Anya hated that. She thought it was sacrilegious.” He smiled and flexed his fingers against the cold curb. The shadows were lengthening, and the chill had made its way through the layers of his clothing. He was ready to suggest they keep walking, but Tibor leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the roof garden with its row of little evergreens.

“That was the year I fell in love for the first time,” he said. “I never told you. You were too young to understand, and by the time you were old enough I was in love with someone else, Zsuzsanna, that girl I used to take to dances at gimnázium. But before her there was a girl named Rózsa Geller. Rózsika. I was thirteen, she was sixteen. She was the oldest daughter of the family I boarded with in Debrecen. The ones who moved away just before you came to school.”

Andras caught an unfamiliar edge in Tibor’s voice, almost a note of bitterness. “Sixteen,” he said, and gave a low whistle. “An older woman.”

“I used to watch her bathing. She used to bathe in the kitchen in a tin washtub, and my bed was on the other side of the curtain. That curtain was full of holes. She must have known I was watching.”

“And you saw everything.”

“Everything. She would stand there pouring water over herself and humming the Marseillaise.”

“Why the Marseillaise?”

“She was in love with some French film star. He’d been in a lot of war movies.”

“Pierre Fresnay.”

“That’s right, that was the bastard’s name. How did you know?”

“That friend of mine, Ben Yakov, looks just like him.”

“Hm. I’m glad I didn’t know that when I met your friend.”

“So what happened?”

“One day her father caught me watching. He beat me bloody. Broke my arm.”

“You broke your arm playing football!”

“That was the official story. Her father said he’d turn me over to the police if I told the truth. They put me out of the house. I never saw her again.”

“Oh, God, Tibor. I never knew.”

“That was the idea.”

“It’s terrible! You were only thirteen.”

“And she was sixteen. She knew better than to let it go on. She must have known I’d get caught eventually. Maybe she wanted me to get caught.” He stood and brushed the dust from his trousers. “So you see, that’s my experience with older women.”

There was a motion behind one of the windows of the house, the shadow of a woman crossing a square of light. Andras stood up beside his brother. He imagined the sculptor coming to her window, seeing them loitering there as if they were waiting to catch a glimpse of her.

“I’m not thirteen,” Andras said. “Klara’s not sixteen.”

“No, indeed,” Tibor said. “You’re adults. Which means the consequences may be graver if you get in over your heads.”

“It’s too late,” Andras said. “I’m already in over my head. I don’t know what’ll happen. I’m at her mercy.”

“I hope she’ll show some mercy, then,” Tibor said. And he used the Yiddish word rachmones, the same word that had called Andras back to himself three months earlier at the Jardin du Luxembourg.

The next morning they carried Tibor’s bags to the Gare de Lyon, just as they’d carried Andras’s bags to Nyugati Station when he’d left for Paris. Now it was Tibor going off to an unknown life in a foreign place, Tibor going off to study and work and navigate the dark passageways of a foreign language. The wind roared through the channels of the boulevards and tried to twist the suitcases from their hands; the previous day’s warm weather was gone as though they’d only dreamed it. Paris was as gray as it had been the day Andras had arrived. He wished he had an excuse to keep Tibor with him another day, another week. Tibor was right, of course. It was a foolish thing Andras had done, getting involved with Klara Morgenstern. He’d already ventured into dangerous terrain, had found himself edging along a dwindling path toward a blind corner of rock. He didn’t have the shoes for this, nor the provisions, nor the clothing, nor the foresight, nor the mental strength, nor the experience. All he had was a kind of reckless hope-something, he imagined, not unlike the hope that had sent fifteenth-century explorers hurtling off the map. Having pointed out how ill-equipped Andras was, how could Tibor now let him go on alone? How could he step onto a train and speed off to Italy, even if medical school waited at the other end? His role had always been to show Andras the way when the way was obscure-at times, in their boyhood, quite literally, his hand was Andras’s only guide in the dark. But now they had reached the Gare de Lyon; there was the train itself, black and impassive on its tracks.

“All right, then,” Tibor said. “Off I go.”

Stay, Andras wanted to say. “Good luck,” he said.

“Write to me. And don’t get in trouble. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good. I’ll see you before long.”

Liar, Andras wanted to say.

Tibor put a hand on Andras’s sleeve. He looked as if he meant to say something more, a few final words in Hungarian before he boarded a train full of Italian- and French-speakers, but he was silent as he glanced off toward the vast mouth of the station and the tangle of tracks that lay beyond it. He stepped up onto the train and Andras handed him his leather satchel. His silver-rimmed glasses slid down the bridge of his nose; he pushed them back with his thumb.

“Write me when you get there,” Andras said.

Tibor touched his cap and disappeared into the third-class car, and was gone.

When the train had left the station, Andras went back through the SORTIE doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn’t care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs. His feet led him farther from his brother, westward across town to the boulevard Raspail, all the way to the École Spéciale, and in through the blue doors of the courtyard.

The yard was full of students, all of them strangely silent, standing in head-bowed clumps of three and four. A heavy stillness hung in the air above the yard. It had a palpable black presence, like a flock of crows frozen midflight. On a splintered bench in a corner Perret himself sat with his head in his hands.

This was what had happened: By way of the slow-moving provincial post, the news of Polaner’s injuries had reached Lemarque in Bayeux, where he’d fled to his parents’ farm after the attack. The letter, written by his accomplices, told him that Polaner lay in the hospital on the brink of death, bleeding from internal wounds: an account meant to hearten Lemarque, to show him that all had not been in vain, that the work of the beating had continued after the attack. Having received this letter, Lemarque had written two of his own. One he addressed to the directors of the school, claiming responsibility for what had happened and naming three other students, third- and fourth-year men, who had participated. The other he addressed to Polaner, a brief admission of remorse and love. Late at night, after he’d left both letters on the kitchen table, he’d hanged himself from a crossbeam in his parents’ barn. His father had discovered the body that morning, cold and blue as the hibernal dawn itself.