“Yes,” she said. “Yes. When Elisabet’s done with school. But that doesn’t mean I’m letting her run off to America with that smooth-talking young man.”

“Seven months,” he said.

“And perhaps by then we’ll solve our geographic problem.”

He held her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyelids. “Let’s not worry about that now,” he said. “Promise me you won’t think about it.”

“I can’t promise that, Andras. We’ll have to think about it if we’re to solve it.”

“We’ll think about it later. Now I want to kiss you. May I?”

In answer she put her arms around him, and he kissed her, wishing he had nothing else to do all day, all year, all his life. Then he pulled away and said, “I’m unprepared for this. I don’t have anything for you. I don’t have a ring.”

“A ring!” she said. “I don’t want a ring.”

“You’ll have one, though. I’ll see to it. And I wasn’t speaking lightly when I said I wanted to write to your mother.”

“That’s a tricky business, as you know.”

“I wish we could speak to József,” Andras said. “He could write to her, or enclose a letter from me inside one of his own.”

Klara pulled her lips together. “From what you’ve told me about his life, it hasn’t come to seem any wiser to involve him in our situation.”

“If we’re to be married, he’ll have to know sometime. The Latin Quarter is a small place.”

She sighed. “I know. It’s rather complicated.” She went back to the sofa and opened the folded newspaper. “At least we’ve got some time to think about it. Seven months,” she said. “Who knows what will happen by then? Shouldn’t we all just get married at once? Shouldn’t I be glad that my child might go across the ocean to America? If there’s a war, she’ll be safer there.”

That elusive ghost, safety. It had fled Hungary, had fled the halls of the École Spéciale, had fled Germany long before November 9. But as he sat down beside her and looked at the newspaper on her lap, he tasted the shock of it all over again. He followed the line of her hand to the front-page photograph: a man and woman in their nightclothes, standing in the street; a little boy between them, clutching what looked to be a Punch doll with a cone-shaped hat; and before them, shedding its violent light on them, a house on fire from its doorstep to its rafters. In the places where the fire had burned away carpets and flooring, wallpaper and plaster, he could see the structure of the house illuminated like the stripped bones of an animal. And he saw what an architect might see, what the man and woman and boy could not have seen as they stood in the street at that moment: that the main supports had already burned through, and in another moment the structure would fall in upon itself like a poorly built model, its beams crumbling to ash.

IN EARLY DECEMBER, Madame Gérard threw a party for her own birthday. Klara received an invitation on a heavy ivory-colored card printed with gold ink; Andras was invited as her guest. The night of the party he put on an immaculate white shirt and a black silk tie, sprinkled and brushed his best dinner jacket, and polished the shoes Tibor had brought him the year before from Budapest. He told himself that there was nothing extraordinary about the fact that Marcelle had invited him; in fact, though, this was to be the first time he had seen her since her departure from the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, and the first time he would appear in public as Klara’s future husband, among people who might consider him her inferior. What he feared was not just what her friends might think of him but what she might think, seeing him for the first time among the members of her circle. Those choreographers, those dancers, those composers who sometimes made her gifts of their music: How could he appear in comparison to them except as a novice, an aspirant, a perhaps-someday-but-not-yet? He wondered if that was the effect Marcelle had intended. But Klara herself distracted him from his concerns; when he arrived at the rue de Sévigné that night her manner was light and intimate. They walked the chilly boulevards toward Marcelle’s new apartment in the Eleventh, through streets that smelled of woodsmoke and approaching cold. It was difficult to believe it was nearly December, a year since they’d first met. Soon the skating ponds in the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne would be frozen solid once again.

At Madame Gérard’s they were received by a girl in a crisp white apron who took their coats and ushered them into a parquet-floored drawing room. The building belonged to the Belle Époque, but Madame Gérard had decorated her new apartment in the modern style: in the drawing room there were low black leather sofas and African masks and vases of veined malachite on glass shelves. Grass-green draperies hung at the windows, and two steel tables stood at attention beside the sofas like slim-legged greyhounds. On the tables were a pair of Brancusis, two tense flames of black marble. All of it was the fruit of her recent success; she had conquered Paris in every role she’d played since The Mother, and had just received a series of enthusiastic reviews for her Antigone at the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, where Andras and Forestier had installed an elaborate surrealist set. Now Madame Gérard herself, dressed in a chartreuse silk gown, crossed the drawing room to welcome Andras and Klara. She kissed them both, and after they’d exchanged their greetings she led Andras to a black lacquered console table where drinks were being served.

“Look how you’ve turned out,” she said, and touched his lapel. “A gentleman after all. Evening dress suits you. I may have a terrible fit of jealousy before the night is over.”

“It was kind of you to invite me,” Andras said. He heard the forced calm in his own voice, and he thought he saw the hint of a smile at the corner of Madame Gérard’s mouth.

“It was kind of you to indulge me on my birthday,” she said. And then, more pointedly: “You’ll enjoy the company, I believe. Our friend Monsieur Novak is here with his wife. Have you heard they’re to return to Hungary?” She tilted her head toward a corner of the room, where Novak and his wife stood talking to a silver-haired man in a cravat. “I must say, he reacted with some surprise when I told him you and Klara would be here. I imagine you must know all about…?”

“Yes, I know all about,” he said. “Though I’m sure you’d rather I hadn’t. It would have entertained you, wouldn’t it, to have been able to tell me yourself.”

“I’ve only ever looked out for your well-being,” Madame Gérard said. “I warned you about getting involved with Klara. I must say I was astonished to hear that things had become so serious between you. I was certain she viewed you as a kind of entertainment.”

Andras felt the heat rising beneath his skin. “And is this your idea of an entertainment?” he said. “To invite people to your house and then insult them?”

“Lower your voice, darling,” Madame Gérard said. “You attribute too much cleverness to me. How is one to keep straight everyone else’s romantic intrigues? If I’d invited only those of my friends whose connections were uncomplicated, I couldn’t have invited anyone at all!”

“I know you better than that,” Andras said. “I don’t think you do anything by mistake.”

“Well, I can see you’ve got me thoroughly romanticized,” she said, obviously pleased. “What a charming young man you are.”

“And when exactly does Monsieur Novak depart for Hungary?” he asked.

She gave her low dissonant laugh. “January,” she said. “I can’t imagine you’ll be sad to see him go. Though I’m not certain how Klara will take it. They were very close, you understand.” She handed him a glass of whiskey with ice, and turned her head toward Klara, who had taken a seat beside Novak on a low black sofa. “You mustn’t worry what people will say about the two of you, by the way-about your engagement, I mean. Everyone loves Klara’s eccentricities. I find the situation irresistible myself. It’s like a fairy tale! Look at you. She’s turned you from a frog into a prince.”