“Where are we?” Andras asked.

“You’ll see.”

The courtyard was filled with courtyard things: bicycles and potted ferns and rows of tomato plants in wooden boxes. At the center there was a mossy fountain with lily pads and goldfish; a dark-haired girl sat at its edge, trailing her hand in the water. She looked up at Andras and Klara with serious eyes, then dried her hand on her skirt and ran to one of the ground-floor apartments. Klara led Andras to an open stairway with a vine-patterned railing, and they climbed three flights of shallow stairs. With a different key she opened a set of double doors and let him into an apartment overlooking the street. The place smelled of roasted chicken and fried potatoes. There were four brass coat hooks beside the door; an old homburg hat of Andras’s hung on one of them, and Klara’s gray coat on the other.

“This can’t be our apartment,” Andras said.

“Who else’s?”

“Impossible. It’s too fine.”

“You haven’t even seen it yet. Don’t judge it so quickly. You might find it not at all to your taste.”

But of course it was exactly to his taste. She knew perfectly well what he liked. There was a red-tiled kitchen, a bedroom for Andras and Klara, a tiny second bedroom that might be used as a nursery, a private bath with its own enameled tub. The sitting room was lined with bookshelves, which Klara had begun to fill with new books on ballet and music and architecture. There was a wooden drafting table in one corner, a distant Hungarian cousin of the one Klara had given Andras in Paris. A phonograph stood on a thin-legged taboret in another corner. At the far end of the room, a low sofa faced an inlaid wooden table. Two ivory-striped armchairs flanked the high windows with their view of the neo-Baroque apartment building across the street.

“It’s a home,” he said. “You made us a home.” And he took her into his arms.

What he wanted most during the short span of his furlough, he told Klara, was to be at liberty to see to his pregnant wife’s needs. She resisted at first, pointing out that he had no one to care for him at Bánhida. But he argued that to care for her would be a far greater luxury than to be cared for himself. And so, that first night home, after they’d eaten the roasted chicken and potatoes, she allowed him to make her coffee and read to her from the newspaper, and then to run a bath for her and bathe her with the large yellow sponge. Her pregnant body was a miraculous thing to him. A pink bloom had come out beneath the surface of her pale skin, and her hair seemed thicker and more lustrous. He washed it himself and pulled it forward to drape over her breasts. Her areolae had grown larger and darker, and a faint tawny line had emerged between her navel and her pubic triangle, transected by the silvery scar of her earlier pregnancy. Her bones no longer showed so starkly beneath the skin. Most notably, a complicated inward look had appeared in her eyes-such a deep commingling of sadness and expectancy that it was almost a relief when she closed them. As she lay back in the bathtub, cooling her arms against the enamel, he was struck by the fact that at Bánhida his life had been reduced to the simplest needs and emotions: the hope for a piece of carrot in his soup, the fear of the foreman’s anger, the desire for another fifteen minutes of sleep. For Klara, who had lived in greater security here in Budapest, there remained the opportunity for more complicated reflection. It was happening as he watched, as he bathed her with the yellow sponge.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said. “I can’t guess.”

She opened her gray eyes and turned to him. “How strange it is,” she said. “To be pregnant while we’re at war. If Hitler controls all of Europe, and perhaps Russia, too, who knows what may happen to this child? There’s no use pretending Horthy can keep us from harm.”

“Do you think we should try to emigrate?”

She sighed. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve even written to Elisabet. But the situation is as I expected. It’s almost impossible to get an entry visa now. Even if we could, I’m not certain I’d want to. Our families are here. I can’t imagine leaving my mother again, particularly now. And it’s hard to imagine starting another life in a strange country.”

“The travel, too,” he said, stroking her wet shoulders. “It’s hardly safe to cross an ocean during a war.”

Encircling her knees with her arms, she said, “It’s not just the war I’ve been thinking about. I’ve had all kinds of doubts.”

“What doubts?”

“About what sort of mother I’ll be to this child. About the hundred thousand ways I failed Elisabet.”

“You didn’t fail Elisabet. She turned out a strong and beautiful woman. And your situation was different then. You were alone, and you were just a child yourself.”

“And now I’m practically an old woman.”

“That’s nonsense, Klara.”

“Not really.” She frowned at her knees. “I’m thirty-four, you know. The birth was a near disaster last time. The obstetrician says my womb may have been damaged. My mother came to my last appointment, and I wish now that she hadn’t. She’s been driving herself mad with worry.”

“Why, Klara? Is there a danger to the baby?” He took her chin and made her raise her eyes to him. “Are you in danger yourself?”

“Women give birth every day,” she said, and tried to smile.

“What did the doctor say?”

“He says there’s a risk of complication. He wants me to have the child at the hospital.”

“Of course you’ll have it at the hospital,” Andras said. “I don’t care what it costs. We’ll find a way to pay.”

“My brother will help,” she said.

“I’ll get work,” Andras said. “We’ll make the money somehow.”

“György wouldn’t begrudge us anything,” Klara said. “No more than your own brothers would.”

Andras didn’t want to argue, not during the brief time they had together. “I know he’d help if we needed it,” he said. “Let’s hope we don’t have to ask him.”

“My mother wants me to move home to Benczúr utca,” Klara said, twisting her wet hair into a rope. “She doesn’t understand why I insist that you and I must have our own apartment. She thinks it’s a needless expense. And she doesn’t like me to be alone. What if something were to happen? she says. As if I hadn’t spent all those years alone in Paris.”

“She wants to protect you all the more, because of that,” he said. “It must have tortured her not to be with you when you were pregnant with Elisabet.”

“I understand, of course. But I’m not a child of fifteen anymore.”

“Perhaps she’s right, though. If there’s a danger, wouldn’t it be better for you to be at home?”

“Not you, too, Andráska!”

“I hate to think of you being alone.”

“I’m not alone. Ilana is here with me almost every day. And I can walk to my mother’s house in six minutes. But I can’t live there again, and not just because I’m accustomed to being on my own. What if the authorities were to discover who I am? If I were living in my family’s house, they’d be directly implicated.”

“Ah, Klara! How I wish you didn’t have to think about any of this.”

“And how I wish you didn’t either,” she said. And then she stood from the bath, and the water fell from her skin in a glittering curtain, and he followed the new curves of her body with his hands.

Later that night, when he found he couldn’t sleep, he got out of bed and went into the sitting room, to the drafting table Klara had bought for him; he ran his hands over that smooth hard surface devoid of paper or tools. There was a time when he might have comforted himself with work, even if it were just a project he had set himself; the pure concentration required to draw a series of fine unbroken black lines could turn his mind aside, even if just for a few moments, from the gravest of problems. But the fact was that he’d never before had to worry about the fate of his pregnant wife and his unborn child and the entire Western world. In any case, there was no project he could imagine taking up now; when it came to the study and practice of architecture, his mind was as blank and planless as the drafting table before him. The work he’d done those past two years when he wasn’t cutting trees or building roads or shoveling coal-scratching in notebooks, doodling in the margins of Mendel’s newspapers-might have kept his hands from lying idle; it might even have kept him from going mad. But it had also been a distraction from the fact that his life as a student of architecture was slipping farther and farther away, his hands losing their memory of how to make a perfect line, his mind losing its ability to solve problems of form and function. How far away he felt now from that atelier at the École Spéciale where he and Polaner had suspended a running track from the roof of a sports club. How astounding that such an idea had occurred to them. It seemed an eternity since he’d looked at a building with any thought in his mind beside the hope that its roof wouldn’t leak and that it would keep out the wind. He’d hardly even taken note of what the façade of this building looked like.