For three days all she could do was stare at the dart of sky she could see from her bed. Clouds passed across it; a vee of brown birds flew through it; in the evening it darkened to indigo and then filled with the gold-shot black of Paris night. She watched it as Nevitskaya’s maid, Masha, fed her chicken broth and bathed her forehead. She watched it as Nevitskaya explained that there was no need for Klara to endure the torture of carrying that man’s child. The doctor could perform a simple operation after which Klara would no longer be pregnant. After Nevitskaya left her alone to contemplate her fate, she stared and stared at that changeable dart of sky, scarcely able to comprehend what she had learned. Pregnant. A simple operation. But Madame Nevitskaya didn’t know the whole story; she and Sándor had been lovers for six months before he’d been killed. They had made love the very night of the attack. They had taken precautions, but she knew those precautions didn’t always work. If she was pregnant, it was just as likely that the child was his.

The thought was enough to get her out of bed. She told Madame Nevitskaya that she wouldn’t have an operation, and why. Madame Nevitskaya, a stern, glossy-haired woman of fifty, took Klara in her arms and began to weep; she understood, she said, and would not try to dissuade her. Klara’s parents, informed of her pregnancy and her plans, felt otherwise. They couldn’t abide the idea that she might find herself raising that other person’s child. In fact, her father was so strongly opposed to the idea that he threatened to cut Klara off altogether if she kept the child. What would she do, alone in Paris? She couldn’t dance, not when she was pregnant, and not with an infant to care for; how would she support herself? Wasn’t her situation difficult enough already?

But Klara had made up her mind. She would not have that operation, nor would she give up the baby after she’d carried it. Once it had occurred to her that the child might be Sándor’s, the idea began to take on the weight of a certainty. Let her father cut her off. She would work; she knew what she could do. She went to Madame Nevitskaya and begged to be allowed to teach a few classes of beginning students. She could do it until her pregnancy showed, and she could do it once she’d recovered from the birth. If Nevitskaya would have her as an instructor, it would save her life and the child’s.

Nevitskaya would. She gave Klara a class of seven-year-olds and bought her the black practice dress worn by all the teachers at the school. And soon Klara began to live again. Her appetite came back and she gained weight. Her dizziness disappeared. She found she could sleep at night. Sándor’s child, she thought; not that other’s. She went to a barber shop and got her hair cut short. She bought a sack dress of the kind that was fashionable then, a dress she could wear until late in the pregnancy. She bought a new leather-bound diary. Every day she went to the ballet school and taught her class of twenty little girls. When she couldn’t teach anymore, she begged Masha to let her help with the work around the house. Masha showed her how to clean, how to cook, how to wash; she taught her to navigate the market and the shops. When, in her sixth month, Klara noticed the vendors glancing at her belly and at her bare left hand, she bought a brass band she wore on her third finger like a wedding ring. She bought it as a convenience, but after a time it came to seem as though it really were a wedding ring; she began to feel as if she were married to Sándor Goldstein.

As her ninth month approached, she began to have vivid dreams about Sándor. Not the nightmares she’d had in her first weeks in Paris-Sándor lying in the alley, his eyes open to the sky-but dreams in which they were doing ordinary things together, working on a difficult lift or arguing over the answer to some arithmetic problem or wrestling in the cloakroom of the Operaház. In one dream he was thirteen, stealing sweets with her at the market. In another he was younger still, a thin-armed boy teaching her to dive at Palatinus Strand. She thought of him when the first contractions came on; she thought of him when the water rushed out of her. It was Sándor she cried for when the pain grew long and deep inside her, a white-hot stream of fire threatening to cleave her. When she woke after the cesarean she put out her arms to receive his child.

But it wasn’t his child at all, of course. It was Elisabet.

When she’d finished her story they sat silent by the fire, Andras on the footstool and Klara in the vermilion chair, her feet tucked under her skirt. The tea had grown cold in their cups. Outside, a hard wind had begun to rattle the trees. Andras got up and went to the window, looked down at the entrance of the Collège de France, at its ragged lace collar of clochards.

“Zoltán Novak knows about this,” Andras said.

“He knows the basic facts. He’s the only one in France who does. Madame Nevitskaya died some time ago.”

“You told him so he’d understand why you couldn’t love him.”

“We were very close, Zoltán and I. I wanted him to know.”

“Not even Elisabet knows,” Andras said, smoothing the rim of his cup with his thumb. “She believes she’s the child of someone you loved.”

“Yes,” Klara said. “It couldn’t have helped her to know the truth.”

“And now you’ve told me. You’ve told me so I’d understand what happened at Nice. You fell in love once, with Sándor Goldstein, and you can’t love anyone else. Madame Gérard guessed as much-she told me a long time ago that you were in love with a man who’d died.”

Klara gave a quiet sigh. “I did love Sándor,” she said. “I adored him. But it’s romantic nonsense to suggest that what I felt for him would keep me from falling in love again.”

“What happened at Nice, then?” Andras said. “What made you turn away?”

She shook her head and put her cheek into her hand. “I was frightened, I suppose. I saw what it might be like to have a life with you. For the first time that seemed possible. But there were all the terrible things I hadn’t told you. You didn’t know I had shot and killed a man, or that I was a fugitive from justice. You didn’t know I’d been raped. You didn’t know how damaged I was.”

“How could it have done anything but make me feel closer to you?”

She came to stand beside him at the window, her face flushed and damp, raw-looking in the dim light. “You’re a young man,” she said. “You can love someone whose life is simple. You don’t need any of this. I was certain you’d see the situation that way as soon as I told you. I was certain I’d seem a ruin of a person.”

Last December she’d stood in just the same place with a cup of tea shivering in her hands. You have some too, she’d said, offering the cup. Te.

“Klara,” he said. “You’re mistaken. I wouldn’t trade your complication for anyone else’s simplicity. Do you understand?”

She raised her eyes to him. “It’s difficult to believe.”

“Try,” he said, and drew her close so he could breathe the warm scent of her scalp, the darkness of her hair. Here in his arms was the girl who had lived in the house near the Városliget, the young dancer who had loved Sándor Goldstein, the woman who loved him now. He could almost see inside her that unnameable thing that had remained the same through all of it: her I, her very life. It seemed so small, a mustard seed with one rootlet shot deep into the earth, strong and fragile at once. But it was all there needed to be. It was everything. She had given it to him, and now he held it in his hands.

They spent that night together on the rue des Écoles. In the morning they washed and dressed in the blue chill of Andras’s room, and then walked together to the rue de Sévigné. It was the seventh of November, a cold gray morning feathered with frost. Andras went inside with her to light the coal stove in the studio. He hadn’t entered that place, her own place, for two months. It was quiet in the expectant way of classrooms; it smelled of ballet shoes and rosin, like the Budapest studio she’d described. In a corner stood the drawing table she had given him for his birthday, draped to keep out the dust. She went to it and pulled the sheet free.