"La-bas," she said. she said. "En haut." "En haut."

He dragged his luggage and the massive box into the lift, and took it as high as it would go. At the top, he stepped out into a crush of men and women, of smoke and jazz; the entirety of the Latin Quarter, it seemed, had assembled at Jozsef Hasz's. Leaving his luggage in the hall, he stepped in through the open door of the apartment and repeated the question of Hasz's name to a series of drunken revelers. After a labyrinthine tour of highceilinged rooms he found himself standing on a balcony with Hasz himself, a tall, looselimbed young man in a velvet smoking jacket. Hasz's large gray eyes rested on Andras's in an expression of champagne-tinged bemusement, and he asked a question in French and raised his glass.

Andras shook his head. "I'm afraid it's got to be Hungarian for now," he said.

Jozsef squinted at him. "And which Hungarian are you, exactly?"

"Andras Levi. The Hungarian from your mother's telegram."

"What telegram?"

"Didn't your mother send a telegram?"

"Oh, God, that's right! Ingrid said there was a telegram." Jozsef put a hand on Andras's shoulder, then leaned in through the door of the balcony and shouted, "Ingrid!"

A blond girl in a spangled leotard pushed out onto the balcony and stood with one hand on her hip. A rapid French exchange ensued, after which Ingrid produced from her bosom a folded telegram envelope. Jozsef extracted the slip, read it, looked at Andras, read it again, and fell into a paroxysm of laughter.

"You poor man!" Jozsef said. "I was supposed to meet you at the station two hours ago!"

"Yes, that was the idea."

"You must have wanted to kill me!"

"I might still," Andras said. His head was throbbing in time with the music, his eyes watering, his insides twisting with hunger. It was clear to him he couldn't stay at Jozsef Hasz's, but he could hardly imagine venturing out now to find another place to spend the night.

"Well, you've done well enough without me so far," Jozsef said. "Here you are at my place, where there's enough champagne to last us all night, and plenty of whatever else you like, if you take my meaning."

"All I need is a quiet corner to sleep in. Give me a blanket and put me anywhere."

"I'm afraid there's no quiet corner here," Jozsef said. "You'll have to have a drink instead. Ingrid will get you one. Follow me." He pulled Andras into the apartment and placed him under the care of Ingrid, who produced what must have been the last clean champagne flute in the building and poured Andras a tall sparkling glassful. The bottle sufficed for Ingrid herself; she toasted Andras, gave him a long smoky kiss, and pulled him into the front room, where the pianist was faking his way through "Downtown Uproar" and the partygoers had just started to dance.

In the morning he woke on a sofa beneath a window, his eyes draped in a silk chemise, his head a mass of cotton wool, his shirt unbuttoned, his jacket rolled beneath his head, his left arm stinging with pins and needles. Someone had put an eiderdown over him and opened the curtains; a block of sunlight fell across his chest. He stared up at the ceiling, where the floral froth of a plaster medallion curled around the fluted brass base of a light fixture. A knot of gold branches grew downward from the base, bearing small flame-shaped bulbs. Paris Paris, he thought, and pushed himself up on his elbows. The room was littered with party detritus and smelled of spilled champagne and wilted roses. He had a vague recollection of a prolonged tete-a-tete with Ingrid, and then of a drinking contest with Jozsef and a broad-shouldered American; after that he could remember nothing at all. His luggage and the crate for Jozsef had been dragged inside and stacked beside the fireplace. Hasz himself was nowhere to be seen. Andras rolled from the sofa and wandered down the hall to a white-tiled bathroom, where he shaved at the basin and bathed in a lion-footed tub that dispensed hot water directly from the tap. Afterward he dressed in his only clean shirt and trousers and jacket. As he was searching for his shoes in the main room, he heard a key in the lock. It was Hasz, carrying a pastry-shop box and a newspaper. He tossed the box on a low table and said, "Up so soon?"

"What's that?" Andras said, eyeing the ribbon-tied box.

"The cure for your hangover."

Andras opened the box to find half a dozen warm pastries nestled in waxed paper.

Until that moment he hadn't allowed himself to realize how desperately hungry he was.

He ate one chocolate croissant and was halfway through another before he thought to offer the box to his host, who refused, laughing.

"I've been up for hours," Jozsef said. "I've already had my breakfast and read the news. Spain's a wreck. France still won't send troops. But there are two new beauty queens competing for the title of Miss Europe: the dark and lovely Mademoiselle de Los Reyes of Spain, and the mysterious Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia." He tossed the newspaper to Andras. Two sleek ice-cold beauties in white evening gowns gazed from their photographs on the front page.

"I like de Los Reyes," Andras said. "Those lips."

"She looks like a Nationalist," Jozsef said. "I like the other." He loosened his orange silk scarf and sat back on the sofa, spreading his arms across its curving back.

"Look at this place," he said. "The maid doesn't come until tomorrow morning. I'll have to dine out today."

"You ought to open that box. I'm sure your mother sent you something nice for dinner."

"That box! I forgot all about it." He brought it from across the room and pried open the top with a butter knife. Inside were a tin of almond cookies; a tin of rugelach; a tin into which an entire Linzer torte had been packed without a millimeter to spare; a supply of woolen underclothes for the coming winter; a box of stationery with the envelopes already addressed to his parents; a list of cousins upon whom he was supposed to call; a list of things he was supposed to procure for his mother, including certain intimate ladies' garments; a new opera glass; and a pair of shoes made for him by his shoemaker on Vaci utca, whose talents, he said, were unparalleled by those of any cobbler in Paris.

"My brother works at a shoe store on Vaci utca," Andras said, and mentioned the name of the shop.

"Not the same one, I'm afraid," Jozsef said, a hint of condescension in his tone.

He cut a slice of the Linzer torte, ate it, and pronounced it perfect. "You're a good man, Levi, dragging this cake across Europe. How can I repay the favor?"

"You might tell me how to set up a life here," Andras said.

"Are you sure you want to take instruction from me?" Jozsef said. "I'm a wastrel and a libertine."

"I'm afraid I've got no choice," Andras said. "You're the only person I know in Paris."

"Ah! Lucky you, then," Jozsef said. As they ate slices of Linzer torte from the tin, he recommended a Jewish boardinghouse and an art-supply store and a student dining club where Andras might get cheap meals. He didn't dine there himself, of course-generally he had his meals sent up from a restaurant on the boulevard Saint-Germain--but he had friends who did, and found it tolerable. As for the fact that Andras was enrolled at the Ecole Speciale and not the Beaux-Arts, it was regrettable that they wouldn't be schoolmates but probably just as well for Andras; Jozsef was a notoriously bad influence.

And now that they had solved the problem of setting up Andras's life in Paris, didn't he want to come out to the balcony to have a smoke and look at his new city?

Andras allowed Jozsef to lead him through the bedroom and through the high French doors. The day was cold, and the previous night's fog had settled into a fine drizzle; the sun was a silver coin behind a scrim of cloud.

"Here you are," Jozsef said. "The most beautiful city on earth. That dome is the Pantheon, and over there is the Sorbonne. To the left is St.-Etienne-du-Mont, and if you lean this way you can see a sliver of Notre-Dame."

Andras rested his hands on the railing and looked out over an expanse of unfamiliar gray buildings beneath a cold curtain of mist. Chimneys crowded the rooftops like strange alien birds, and the green haze of a park hovered beyond a battalion of zinc mansards. Far off to the west, blurred by distance, the Tour Eiffel melted upward into the sky. Between himself and that landmark lay thousands of unknown streets and shops and human beings, filling a distance so vast as to make the tower look wiry and fragile against the slate-gray clouds.

"Well?" Jozsef said.

"There's a lot of it, isn't there?"

"Enough to keep a man busy. In fact, I've got to be off again in a few minutes. I've got a lunch appointment with a certain Mademoiselle Betoulinsky of Russia." He winked and straightened his tie.

"Ah. You mean the girl in sequins from last night?"

"I'm afraid not," Jozsef said, a slow smile coming to his face. "That's another mademoiselle altogether."

"Maybe you can spare one for me."

"Not a chance, old boy," Jozsef said. "I'm afraid I need them all to myself." And he slipped through the balcony door and returned to the large front room, where he wrapped the orange silk scarf around his neck again and put on a loose jacket of smokecolored wool. He caught up Andras's satchel and Andras took the suitcase, and they brought everything down in the lift.

"I wish I could see you to that boardinghouse, but I'm late to meet my friend,"

Jozsef said once they'd gotten everything out to the curb. "Here's the cab fare, though.

No, I insist! And come around for a drink sometime, won't you? Let me know how you're getting on." He clapped Andras on the shoulder, shook his hand, and went off in the direction of the Pantheon, whistling.

Madame V, the proprietress of the boardinghouse, had a few useless words of Hungarian and plenty of unintelligible Yiddish, but no permanent place for Andras; she managed to communicate that he could spend the night on the couch in the upstairs hallway if he liked, but that he'd better go out at once to look for other lodgings. Still in a haze from the night at Jozsef's, he ventured out into the Quartier Latin amid the artfully disheveled students with their canvas schoolbags, their portfolios, their bicycles, their stacks of political pamphlets and string-tied bakery boxes and market baskets and bouquets of flowers. Among them he felt overdressed and provincial, though his clothes were the same ones in which he had felt elegant and urban a week earlier in Budapest. On a cold bench in a dismal little plaza he combed his phrase book for the words for price price, for student student, for room room, for how much how much. But it was one thing to understand that chambre a chambre a louer meant meant room for rent room for rent, and quite another to ring a doorbell and inquire in French about the chambre chambre. He wandered from Saint-Michel to Saint-Germain, from the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine to the rue Clovis, re-cursing his inattentiveness in French class and making tiny notes in a tiny notebook about the locations of various chambres a louer chambres a louer.

Before he could muster the courage to ring a single bell, he found himself utterly exhausted; sometime after dark he retreated to the boardinghouse in defeat.

That night, as he tried to find a comfortable position on the green sofa in the hallway, young men from all across Europe argued and fought and smoked and laughed and drank until long past midnight. None of the men spoke Hungarian, and none seemed to notice that there was a new man in their midst. Under different circumstances Andras might have gotten up to join them, but now he was so tired he could scarcely turn over beneath the blanket. The sofa, a spindly, ill-padded thing with wooden arms, seemed to have been designed as an instrument of torture. Once the men had gone to bed at last, rats emerged from the wainscoting to conduct their predawn scavengery; they ran the length of the hallway and stole the bread Andras had saved from dinner. The smells of decaying shoes and unwashed men and cooking grease followed him into his dreams. When he woke, sore and exhausted, he decided that one night had been enough. He would go out into the quartier that morning and inquire at the first place that advertised a room for rent.

On the rue des Ecoles, near a tiny paved square with a spreading chestnut tree, he found a building with that now-familiar sign in the window: chambre a louer chambre a louer. He knocked on the red-painted door and crossed his arms, trying to ignore the rush of anxiety in his chest. The door swung open to reveal a short, square, heavy-browed woman, her mouth bent sideways into a scowl; on the bridge of her nose rested a pair of thick blackrimmed spectacles that made her eyes look tiny and faraway, as though they belonged to another, smaller person. Her wiry gray hair was flattened on one side, as if she had just been sleeping in a wing chair with her head on the wing. She put a fist on her hip and stared at Andras. Summoning all his courage, Andras forcefully mispronounced his need and pointed to the sign in the window.

The concierge understood. She beckoned him into a narrow tiled hall and led him up a spiral staircase with a skylight at the top. When they could go no higher, she took him down the hall to a long narrow garret with an iron bed against one wall, a crockery basin on a wooden stand, a farm table, a green wooden chair. Two dormer windows looked out onto the rue des Ecoles; one of them was open, and on the windowsill sat an abandoned nest and the remnants of three blue eggs. In the fireplace there was a rusted grate, a broken toasting fork, an ancient crust of bread. The concierge shrugged and named a price. Andras searched his mind for the names of numbers, then cut the price in half. The concierge spat on the floor, stomped her feet, railed at Andras in French, and finally accepted his offer.

So it began: his life in Paris. He had an address, a brass key, a view. His view, like Jozsef's, included the Pantheon and the pale limestone clock tower of St.-Etienne-duMont. Across the street was the College de France, and soon enough he would learn to use it as a marker for his building: 34 rue des Ecoles, en face du College de France 34 rue des Ecoles, en face du College de France.

Down the block was the Sorbonne. And farther away, down the boulevard Raspail, was the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture, where classes would begin on Monday. Once he had cleaned the room from top to bottom and unpacked his clothes into an apple crate, he counted his money and made a shopping list. He went down to the shops and bought a glass jar full of red currant jam, a box of cheap tea, a box of sugar, a mesh strainer, a bag of walnuts, a small brown crock of butter, a long baguette, and, as a single extravagance, a tiny nugget of cheese.

What a pleasure it was to fit his key to the lock, to open the door to his private room. He unloaded his groceries onto the windowsill and laid out his drawing supplies on the table. Then he sat down, sharpened a pencil with his knife, and sketched his view of the Pantheon onto a blank postal card. On its reverse he wrote his first message from Paris: Dear Tibor, I am here! I have a desperate garret; it's everything I hoped for. On Dear Tibor, I am here! I have a desperate garret; it's everything I hoped for. On Monday I start school. Hurrah! Liberte, egalite, fraternite! With love, Andras. All he lacked was a stamp. He thought he might borrow one from the concierge; he knew there was a postbox around the corner. As he tried to picture exactly where it was, what came to mind instead was the recollection of an envelope, a wax seal, a monogram. He had forgotten the promise he'd made to the elder Mrs. Hasz. Her missive to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sevigne still waited in his suitcase. He dragged the case out from beneath the bed, half fearing that the letter would be gone, but it was there in the pocket where he'd put it, the wax seal intact. He ran downstairs to the concierge's apartment and, with the help of his phrase book and a series of urgent gestures, begged a pair of stamps. After a search, he located the boite aux lettres boite aux lettres and slipped Tibor's card inside. Then, imagining and slipped Tibor's card inside. Then, imagining the pleasure of some silver-haired gentleman when the next day's mail arrived, he dropped Mrs. Hasz's letter into the anonymous dark of the box.

CHAPTER FOUR.

Ecole Speciale TO GET TO SCHOOL he had to cross the Jardin du Luxembourg, past the elaborate Palais, past the fountain and the flowerbeds teeming with late snapdragons and marigolds. Children sailed elegant miniature boats in the fountain, and Andras thought with a kind of indignant pride of the scrapwood boats he and his brothers had sailed on the millpond in Konyar. There were green benches and close-clipped limes, a carousel with painted horses. On the far side of the park was a cluster of what looked to Andras like neat brown dollhouses; when he got closer he could hear the hum of bees. A veiled beekeeper bent toward one of the hives, waving his canister of smoke.

Andras walked down the rue de Vaugirard, with its art-supply shops and narrow cafes and secondhand bookstores, then down the wide boulevard Raspail with its stately apartment buildings. Already he felt a little more Parisian than he had when he'd first arrived. He had his apartment key on a cord around his neck, a copy of L'Oeuvre L'Oeuvre under under his arm. He had knotted his scarf the way Jozsef Hasz had knotted his, and he wore the strap of his leather bag slung diagonally across his chest, in the manner of the students of the Latin Quarter. His life in Budapest--the job at Past and Future Past and Future, the apartment on Harsfa utca, the familiar sound of the streetcar bell--seemed to belong to another universe. With an unexpected pang of homesickness, he imagined Tibor sitting at their usual sidewalk table at their favorite cafe, within sight of the statue of Jokai Mor, the famous novelist who had escaped the Austrians during the 1848 revolution by disguising himself in his wife's clothing. Farther east, in Debrecen, Matyas would be drawing in his notebook as his classmates studied Latin declensions. And what about Andras's parents?

He must write to them tonight. He touched the silver watch in his pocket. His father had had it restored just before Andras had left; it was a fine old thing, its numbers painted in a spidery copperplate script, its hands a deep blue iridescent metal. The workings still functioned as well as they had in Andras's grandfather's time. Andras remembered sitting on his father's knee and winding the watch, taking care not to tighten the spring too far; his father had done the same thing when he was a boy. And here was that same watch in Paris in 1937, a time when a person might be transported a distance of twelve hundred kilometers in a flash of days, or a telegram sent across a wire network in a matter of minutes, or a radio signal transmitted instantaneously through thin air. What a time to study architecture! The buildings he designed would be the ships in which human beings would sail toward the horizon of the twentieth century, then off the map and into the new millennium.

He found he had walked past the gates of the Ecole Speciale and now had to retrace his steps. Young men streamed in through a pair of tall blue doors at the center of a gray neoclassical building, the name of the school cut into the stone of its cornice. The Ecole Speciale d'Architecture! They had wanted him, had seen his work and chosen him, and he had come. He ran up the front steps and in through those blue doors. On the wall of the entryway was a plaque with gold bas-relief busts of two men: Emile Trelat, who had founded the school, and Gaston Trelat, who had succeeded his father as director.

Emile and Gaston Trelat. Names he would always remember. He swallowed twice, smoothed his hair, and entered the registrar's office.

The young woman behind the desk seemed a figure from a dream. Her skin was the color of dark-stained walnut, her close-cropped hair as glossy as satin. Her gaze was friendly, her dark-fringed eyes steady on his own. It didn't occur to him to try to speak.

Never before had he seen a woman so beautiful, nor had he ever encountered in real life a person of African descent. Now this gorgeous young black Frenchwoman asked him a question he couldn't understand, and he mumbled one of his few French words-- desole desole-and wrote his name on a slip of paper, which he pushed across the desk. The young woman thumbed through a stack of thick envelopes in a wooden box and extracted one with his name, L EVI, printed across the top in precise block capitals.

He thanked her in his awkward French. She told him he was welcome. He might have continued to stand there and stare if a group of students hadn't come in at that moment, calling greetings to her and leaning over the desk to kiss her cheeks. Eh, Lucia! Eh, Lucia!

Ca va, bellissima? Andras slipped past the others, holding his envelope against his chest, Andras slipped past the others, holding his envelope against his chest, and went out into the hall. Everyone had gathered under the glass roof of a central atrium where studio assignments had just been posted. He sat down on a low bench there and opened his envelope to find a list of classes: COURS PROFESSEUR HISTOIRE D'ARCHITECTUREA. PERRET LES.

STATIQUESv. LE BOURGEOIS ATELIERP. VAGO DESSINAGEM. LABELLE All matter-of-fact, as though it were perfectly natural for Andras to study those subjects under the tutelage of famous architects. There was a long list of required texts and materials, and a small white card handwritten in Hungarian (by whom?) indicating that Andras, due to his scholarship status, would be permitted to purchase his books and supplies on the school's credit at a bookstore on the boulevard Saint-Michel.

He read and reread the message, then looked around the atrium, wondering who could have been responsible for that piece of communication. The crowd of students provided no clue. None of them looked even vaguely Hungarian; they were all hopelessly, perfectly Parisian. But in one corner a trio of uncertain-looking young men stood close together and scanned the room. He could tell at a glance that they were firstyear students, and the names on their folders suggested they were Jewish: ROSEN, P OLANER, B EN Y AKOV. He raised a hand in greeting, and they nodded, a kind of tacit recognition passing between them. The tallest of them waved him over.

Rosen was lanky, freckled, with unruly red hair and the vague beginnings of a goatee. He took Andras by the shoulder and introduced Ben Yakov, who resembled the handsome French film star Pierre Fresnay; and Polaner, small and light-boned, with a neat, close-shorn head and tapering hands. Andras greeted everyone and repeated his own name, and the young men's conversation continued in quick French as Andras tried to pick up a thread of meaning. Rosen seemed to be the leader of the group; he led the conversation, and the others listened and responded. Polaner seemed nervous, buttoning and unbuttoning the top button of his antique-looking velvet jacket. The handsome Ben Yakov eyed a group of young women; one of them waved, and he waved in return. Then he leaned in toward Polaner and Rosen to make what could only have been a suggestive joke, and the three of them laughed. Though Andras found himself struggling to follow the men's talk, and though they had hardly addressed him at all, he felt an acute desire to know them. When they went to look at the studio lists, he was glad to find they were all in the same group.

After a short time the students began to move out into the stone-walled courtyard, where tall trees overshadowed rows of wooden benches. One student carried a lectern to a small paved area at the front, and the others sat down on the benches. From beyond the stone courtyard walls came the rush and hum of traffic. But Andras was here inside, sitting beside three men whose names he knew; he was one of these students, and he belonged on this side of the wall. He tried to take note of the feeling, tried to imagine how he might write about it to Tibor, to Matyas. But before he could put the words together in his mind, a door opened in the side of the building and a man strode out. He looked as though he could have been a military captain; he wore a long gray cloak lined in red, and sported a short triangular beard with wax-curled moustaches. His eyes were narrow and fierce behind rimless pince-nez. In one hand he carried a walking stick, and in the other what looked like a jagged gray rock. Any other man, it seemed to Andras, would have had to bow under the weight of the thing, but this man crossed the courtyard with his back straight and his chin set at a martial angle. He stepped up to the lectern and set the rock down upon it with a hollow thud.

"Attention,"

he bellowed.

The students fell silent and came to attention, their backs straightening as if they had been pulled by invisible strings. Quietly, a tall young man in a frayed work shirt slid onto the bench beside Andras and bent his head toward Andras's ear.

"That's Auguste Perret," the young man said in Hungarian. "He was my teacher, and now he'll be yours."

Andras looked at the young man in surprise and relief. "You're the one who wrote the note in my packet," he said.

"Listen," the man said, "and I'll translate."

Andras listened. At the lectern, Auguste Perret lifted the jagged rock in both hands and asked a question. The question, according to Andras's translator, was whether anyone knew what this building material was. You there, in front? Concrete, that was correct. Reinforced concrete. By the time they finished their five years at the school, all of them would know everything there was to know about reinforced concrete. Why?

Because it was the future of the modern city. It would make buildings that surpassed in height and strength anything that had been built before. Height and strength, yes; and beauty. Here at the Ecole Speciale we were not seduced seduced by beauty, however; leave that to by beauty, however; leave that to the sons of privilege at that other school that other school. That school was a gentlemen's institution, a place where boys went to play at the art of dessinage; dessinage; we at the Ecole Speciale were we at the Ecole Speciale were interested in real architecture, buildings that people could inhabit. If our designs were beautiful, so much the better; but let them be beautiful in a manner that belonged to the common man. We were here because we believed in architecture as a democratic art; because we believed that form and function were of equal importance; because we, the avantgarde, had shrugged off the bonds of aristocratic tradition and had begun to think for ourselves. Let anyone who wanted to build Versailles stand now and go through that gate. That other school That other school was only three Metro stops away. was only three Metro stops away.

The professor paused, his arm flung toward the gate, his eyes fixed on the rows of students. "Non?" "Non?" he shouted. he shouted. "Pas un?" "Pas un?"

No one moved. The professor stood statuelike before them. Andras had the sense of being a figure in a painting, paralyzed for all eternity by Perret's challenge. People would admire the painting in museums centuries from now. Still he would be sitting on the bench, inclined slightly toward this man with the cape and the white beard, this general among architects.

"He gives this speech every year," the Hungarian man next to Andras whispered.

"Next he'll talk about your responsibility to the students who will come after you."

"Les etudiants qui viennent apres vous," the professor went on, and the Hungarian the professor went on, and the Hungarian translated. Those students were relying upon you to study assiduously. If you did not, they, too, would fail. You would be taught by those who came before you; at the Ecole Speciale you would learn collaboration, because your life as an architect would involve close work with others. You might have your own vision, but without the help of your colleagues that vision wasn't worth the paper it was drawn upon. In this school, Emile Trelat had instructed Robert Mallet-Stevens, Mallet-Stevens had instructed Fernand Fenzy, Fernand Fenzy had instructed Pierre Vago, and Pierre Vago would instruct you.

At that, the professor pointed into the audience, and the young man beside Andras stood up and made a polite bow. He strode to the front of the assembly, took his place beside Professor Perret at the lectern, and began addressing the students in French. Pierre Vago. This man who had been translating for Andras--this rumpled-looking young man in an inkstained work shirt--was the P. VAGO of Andras's class schedule. His studio leader. His professor. A Hungarian. Andras felt suddenly faint. For the first time it seemed to him he might have a chance of surviving at the Ecole Speciale. He could hardly concentrate on what Pierre Vago was saying now, in his elegant, slightly accented French. Pierre Vago had indeed been the one who'd written the Hungarian note in Andras's manila envelope. Pierre Vago, it occurred to Andras, was probably the one man responsible for his being there at all.

"Hey," Rosen said, pulling Andras's sleeve. "Regardes-toi." "Regardes-toi."

In the excitement, Andras's nose had begun to bleed. Red spots glistened on his white shirt. Polaner looked at him with concern and offered a handkerchief; Ben Yakov went pale and turned away. Andras took the handkerchief and pressed it against his nose.

Rosen made him tip his head back. A few people turned to see what was going on.

Andras sat bleeding into the handkerchief, not caring who was looking, happier than he'd ever been in his life.

Later that day, after the assembly, after Andras's nosebleed had stopped and he'd traded his own clean handkerchief for the one he'd bled upon, after the first meeting of the studio groups, and after he'd exchanged addresses with Rosen, Polaner, and Ben Yakov, Andras found himself in Vago's cluttered office, sitting on a wooden stool beside the drafting table. On the walls were sketched and printed plans, black-and-white watercolors of beautiful and impossible buildings, a scale drawing of a city from high above. In one corner was a heap of paint-stained clothes; a rusted, twisted bicycle frame leaned against the wall. Vago's bookshelves held ancient books and glossy magazines and a teakettle and a small wooden airplane and a skinny-legged junk sculpture of a girl.

Vago himself leaned back in his swivel chair, his fingers laced behind his head.

"So," he said to Andras. "Here you are, fresh from Budapest. I'm glad you came. I didn't know if you'd be able to make it on such short notice. But I had to try. It's barbarous, those prejudices about who can study what, and when, and how. It's not a country for men like us."

"But--forgive me--are you Jewish, Professor?"

"No. I'm a Catholic. Educated in Rome." He gave his R R a deep Italianate roll. a deep Italianate roll.

"Then why do you care, sir?"

"Shouldn't I care?"

"Many don't."