“I’ve kept it, just as you asked,” she said.

Andras took the sheet from her and wrapped it around them both. He drew her so close he could feel her hipbones hard against his own, her ribcage pressing against his ribcage as they breathed. He draped the end of the sheet over their heads so they stood shrouded together in a corner of the studio. In the white privacy of that tent he lifted her chin with one finger and kissed her. She drew the sheet tighter around them.

“Let’s never come out,” he said. “Let’s stay here always.”

He bent to kiss her again, full of the certainty that nothing could make him move from that place-not hunger, nor exhaustion, nor pain, nor fear, nor war.

THE NEWS CAME to Andras at studio. Though he was half blind with exhaustion after his night with Klara, he had to go to school; he had a critique that day. It was an emulation project: he’d had to design a single-use space in the style of a contemporary architect. He had designed an architecture studio after Pierre Charreau, modeling it upon the doctor’s house on the rue Saint-Guillaume: a three-level building composed of glass block and steel, flooded with diffuse light all day and glowing from inside at night. Everyone had arrived early to pin their designs to the walls; once Andras had found a place for his drawings, he took a stool from his worktable and sat with the older students around a paint-spattered radio. They were listening to the news, expecting nothing but the usual panchromium of worries.

It was Rosen who caught it first; he turned up the volume so everyone could hear. The German ambassador had just been shot. No, not the ambassador, an embassy official. A secretary of legation, whatever that was. Ernst Eduard vom Rath. Twenty-nine years old. He’d been shot by a child. A child? That couldn’t be right. A youngster. A boy of seventeen. A Jewish boy. A German-Jewish boy of Polish extraction. He had shot the official to avenge the deportation of twelve thousand Jews from Germany.

“Oh, God,” Ben Yakov said, pulling his hands through his pomaded hair. “He’s a dead man.”

Everyone crowded closer. Had the embassy official been killed, or was he still alive? The answer came a moment later: He had been shot four times in the abdomen; he was undergoing surgery at the Alma Clinic on rue de l’Université, not ten minutes from the École Spéciale. It was rumored that Hitler was sending his personal physician from Berlin, along with the director of the Surgical Clinic of the University of Munich. The assailant, Gruenspan or Grinspun, was being held at an undisclosed location.

“Sending his personal physician!” Rosen said. “I’m sure he is. Sending him with a nice big capsule of arsenic for their man.”

“What do you mean?” someone demanded.

“Vom Rath has to die for Germany,” Rosen said. “Once he does, they can do whatever they want to the Jews.”

“They’d never kill their own man.”

“Of course they would.”

“They won’t have to,” another student said. “The man’s been shot four times.”

Polaner had stepped away from the crowd near the radio and had gone to smoke a cigarette by the window. Andras went over and looked down into the courtyard, where two fifth-year students were hanging a complicated wooden mobile from a tree. Polaner cracked the window open and blew a line of smoke out into the chilly air.

“I knew him,” he said. “Not the Jewish boy. The other.”

“Vom Rath?” Andras said. “How?”

Polaner glanced up at Andras and then looked away. He tapped his ash onto the windowsill outside, where it circled for a moment and then scattered. “There’s a certain bar I used to go to,” Polaner said. “He used to go, too.”

Andras nodded in silence.

“Shot,” Polaner said. “By a seventeen-year-old Jewish kid. Vom Rath, of all people.”

Vago came in at that moment and turned off the radio, and everyone began to take their seats for the brief lecture he’d give before the critique. Andras sat on his wooden stool only half listening, scratching a box into the surface of the studio desk with the metal clip of his pencil. It was all too much, what Klara had told him the night before and what had happened at the German Embassy. In his mind they became one: Klara and the Polish-German teenager, both violated, both holding guns in trembling hands, both firing, both condemned. Nazi doctors hastened toward Paris to save or kill a man. And the Polish-German boy was in jail somewhere, waiting to learn if he was a murderer or not. Andras’s drawing had slipped one of its pins and hung askew from the wall. He looked at it and thought, That’s right. At that moment, everything seemed to hang at an angle by a single pin: not just houses, but whole cities, countries, peoples. He wished he could quiet the din in his mind. He wanted to be in the smooth white bed at Klara’s house, in her white bedroom, in the sheets that smelled like her body. But there was Vago now, taking Andras’s drawing by its corner and repinning it to the wall. There was the class gathering around. It was time for his critique. He made himself get up from the table and stand beside his drawing while they discussed it. It was only afterward, when everyone was patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand, that he realized it had been a success.

“Vom Rath didn’t hate the Jews,” Polaner said. “He was a Party member, of course, but he loathed what was going on in Germany. That’s why he came to France: He wanted to get away. At least that was what he told me.”

Two days had passed; Ernst vom Rath had died that afternoon at the Alma Clinic. Hitler’s doctors had come, but they had deferred to the French doctors. According to the evening news broadcast, vom Rath had died of complications from damage to his spleen. A ceremony would be held at the German Lutheran Church that Saturday.

Andras and Polaner had gone to the Blue Dove for a glass of whiskey, but they’d discovered they were short on cash. It was the end of the month; not even the pooled contents of their pockets would buy a single drink. So they told the waiter they would order in a few minutes, and then they sat talking, hoping they could pass half an hour in that warm room before they’d be asked to leave. After a while the waiter brought their usual whiskey and water. When they protested that they couldn’t pay, the waiter twisted one end of his moustache and said, “Next time I’ll charge you double.”

“How did you meet him?” Andras asked Polaner.

Polaner shrugged. “Someone introduced us. He bought me a drink. We talked. He was intelligent and well read. I liked him.”

“But when you learned who he was-”

“What would you have had me do?” Polaner said. “Walk away? Would you have wanted him to do the same to me?”

“But how could you sit there and speak to a Nazi? Especially after what happened last winter?”

“He didn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t have done it. I told you.”

“That’s what he said, at least. But he may have had other motives.”

“For God’s sake,” Polaner said. “Can’t you leave it alone? A man I knew just died. I’m trying to take it in. Isn’t that enough for now?”

“I’m sorry,” Andras said.

Polaner laid his folded hands on the table and rested his chin upon them. “Ben Yakov was right,” he said. “They’ll make an example of that boy. Grynszpan. They’ll have him extradited and then kill him in some spectacular way.”

“They can’t. The world is watching them.”

“All the better, as far as they’re concerned.”

…

Klara stood at the window with the newspaper in her hand, looking down into the rue de Sévigné. She had just read aloud a brief article about the actions the German government would take against the Jewish people in recompense for the catastrophic destruction of German property that resulted from the violence of 9 November. The newspapers were calling it the Night of Broken Glass. Andras walked up and down the length of the room, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. At the writing desk Elisabet opened a school notebook and scratched a series of figures with a pencil.