There was to be a meeting at Munich the next day, a final effort to negotiate peace. Mrs.

Apfel was certain those idiots would come to their senses. He would see, she said; there wouldn't be a war after all.

Andras hadn't heard. He ran to Forestier's and spent the next two days with his ear sewn to the wireless. And on the thirtieth of September it was announced that Hitler had reached an accord with France, Britain, and Italy: Germany would have the Sudetenland in ten days' time. There would, after all, be a military occupation. The Sudeten Czechs would be required to leave their homes and shops and farms without taking a stick of furniture, a single bolt of cloth or ear of corn, and there was to be no program of compensation for the lost goods. In the regions occupied by Polish and Hungarian minorities, popular votes would determine new frontiers; Poland and Hungary would almost certainly reclaim those lost territories. The radio announcer read the agreement in quick grainy French, and Andras struggled to make sense of it. How was it possible that Britain and France had accepted a plan almost identical to the one they'd rejected out of hand a few days earlier? The radio station broadcast the noise of celebration from London; Andras could hear the local jubilation well enough just outside Forestier's studio, where hundreds of Parisians cheered the peace, celebrating Daladier, praising Chamberlain. The men who had been called up could now come home. That was an unarguable good--so many written into the Book of Life for another year. Why, then, did he feel more as Forestier seemed to feel--Forestier, who sat in the corner with his elbows on his knees, his forehead hammocked in his hands? The recent series of events seemed clothed in disgrace. Andras felt the way he might have if, after the attack on Polaner, Professor Perret had preserved peace at the Ecole Speciale by expelling the victim.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, Andras and Polaner went to hear Kol Nidre at the Synagogue de la Victoire. With solemn ceremony, with forehead-scraping genuflections, the cantor and the rabbi prayed for rachmones rachmones upon the congregation and the House of upon the congregation and the House of Israel. They declared that the congregants were released from the vows they'd made that year, to God and to each other. They thanked the Almighty that Europe had avoided war.

Andras gave his thanks with a lingering sense of dread, and as the service progressed, his unhappiness flowed into another channel. That week, the threat of war had once again proved an effective distraction from the situation with Klara. For a time he had fooled himself, had let himself believe that her month of silence might contain a tacit promise, a suggestion that she was still wrestling with the problem that had sent them home early from Nice. But he couldn't deceive himself any longer. She didn't want to see him. They were finished; that was clear. Her silence could not be read otherwise.

That night he went home and put her things into a wooden crate: her comb and brush, two chemises, a stray earring in the shape of a daffodil, a green glass pillbox, a book of Hungarian short stories, a book of sixteenth-century French verse from which she liked to read aloud to him. He lingered for a moment over the book; he'd bought it for her because it contained the Marot poem about the fire that dwelt secretly in snow. He turned to the poem now. Carefully, with his pocketknife, he cut the page from the book and put it into the envelope that contained her letters. Those he kept, because he couldn't bear to part with them. He wrote her a note on a postcard he'd bought as a keepsake months earlier: a photograph of the Square Barye, the tiny park at the eastern tip of the Ile SaintLouis, where he'd spoken the Marot poem into her ear on New Year's Day. Dear Klara Dear Klara, he wrote, here are a few things you left with me. Myfeelings for you are unchanged, but I here are a few things you left with me. Myfeelings for you are unchanged, but I cannot continue to wait without knowing the reason for your silence, or whether it will be broken. So I must make the break myself. I release you from your promises to me. You need not be faithful to me any longer, nor conduct yourself as if you might someday be my wife. I have released you, but I cannot release myself from what I vowed to you; you must do that, Klara, if that is what you want. In the meantime, should you choose to come to me again, you will find that I am still, as ever, your ANDRAS.

He nailed the top onto the crate and hefted it. It weighed almost nothing, those last vestiges of Klara in his life. In the dark he went to her house one last time and set the box on the doorstep, where she would find it in the morning.

The next day he prayed and fasted. During the early service he felt certain he had made a terrible mistake. If he'd waited another week, he thought, she might have come back to him; now he had secured his own unhappiness. He wanted to run from the

synagogue to the rue de Sevigne and retrieve the box before anyone found it. But as the fast scoured him from the inside, he began to believe that he'd done the right thing, that he'd done what he had to do to save himself. He pulled his tallis around his shoulders and leaned into the repetition of the eighteen benedictions. The familiar progression of the prayer brought him greater certainty. Nature had its cycles; there was a time for all things, and all things passed away.

By the evening service he was scraped out and numb and dizzy from fasting. He knew he was sliding toward some abyss, and that he was powerless to stop himself. At last the service concluded with the piercing spiral of the shofar blast. He and Polaner were supposed to go to dinner on the rue Saint-Jacques; Jozsef had invited them to break the fast with his friends from the Beaux-Arts. They walked across the river in silence, sunk into the last stages of their hunger. At Jozsef's there was music and a vast table of liquor and food. Jozsef wished them a happy new year and put glasses of wine into their hands. Then, with a confidential crook of his finger, he drew Andras aside and bent his head toward him.

"I heard the most remarkable thing about you," he said. "My friend Paul told me you're involved with the mother of that tall girl, his obstreperous Elisabet."

Andras shook his head. "Not anymore," he said. And he took a bottle of whiskey from the table and locked himself in Jozsef's bedroom, where he got blind drunk, shouted curses at himself in the mirror, terrified pedestrians by leaning out over the balcony edge, vomited into the fireplace, and finally passed into unconsciousness on the floor.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

Cafe Bedouin JUDAISM OFFERED no shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn, no injunction against shaving or listening to music or going to work. He couldn't live in his torn clothes, couldn't spend his days sitting in ashes. Nor could he turn to more secular modes of comfort; he couldn't afford to drink himself into oblivion every night or suffer a nervous collapse. After he had scraped himself off Jozsef's parquet floor and crawled back to his own apartment, he concluded that he had reached the nadir of his grief. The thought itself was medicinal. If this was the lowest point, then things would have to improve. He had made the break with Klara. Now he had to go on without her.

Classes would soon begin again at the Ecole Speciale; he couldn't fail his second year of school on her account. Nor could he justify hanging himself or leaping from a bridge or otherwise indulging in Greek tragedy. He had to go about the business of his life. He thought these things as he stood at the window of his garret, looking down into the rue des Ecoles, still nursing a wild and irrepressible hope that she'd come around the corner in her red hat, half running to see him, the skirt of her fall coat flying behind her.

But when her silence stretched into a seventh week, even his most fantastical hopes began to dull. Life, oblivious to his grief, continued. Rosen and Ben Yakov returned to Paris with the rest of the students of the Ecole Speciale, Rosen in a state of chronic rage over what had happened and was still happening in Czechoslovakia, Ben Yakov pale with love for a girl he'd met in Italy that summer, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi in Florence. He had vowed to bring the girl to Paris as his bride; he'd taken a job reshelving books at the Bibliotheque Nationale to save money for that purpose. Rosen had a new passion, too: He had joined the Ligue Internationale Contre l'Antisemitisme, and was consumed with rallies and meetings. Andras himself had less time than ever to consider his situation with Klara. With the help of Vago's recommendation, he had been offered the architecture internship for which he'd applied in the spring. He'd had to cut back his hours at Forestier's, but there was a small stipend to make up for the loss of income. Now, three afternoons a week, he found himself at the elbow of an architect named Georges Lemain, playing the junior intern's role of planfiler, pencil-line-eraser, black-coffee-fetcher, calculation-maker. Lemain was a rulernarrow man with a sleek head of clipped gray hair. He spoke rapid metallic French and drew with machinelike precision. Often he infuriated his colleagues by singing operatic airs as he worked. As a result he'd been sequestered in a far corner of the office, walled off by bookshelves filled with back issues of L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui. As Andras worked at his own lowly desk beside Lemain's great drawing table, he learned the airs and could soon sing them on his own. In return for his tolerance and diligence, Lemain began to help Andras with his school assignments. His fleet-looking angles of glass and polished planes of stone began to find their way into Andras's designs. He encouraged Andras to keep a portfolio of private sketches, work that had nothing to do with his Ecole Speciale projects; he urged Andras to show him ideas that he'd been developing. And so, one afternoon in late October, Andras ventured to bring in the plans for the summer house in Nice. Lemain spread the plans on his own worktable and bent over the elevations.

"A wall like this won't last five years in Nice," he said, framing a segment of Andras's drawing with his thumbs. "Consider the salt. These crevices will give it a foothold." He laid a piece of tracing paper over Andras's drawing and sketched in a smooth wall. "But you've found a clever way to use the grade of the hill. The oblique orientation of the patio and terrace works well with the topography." He placed another sheet of tracing paper over the rear elevation and joined two levels of the terrace into a single curving slope. "Not too much terrace, though. Keep the shape of the hill intact.

You can plant rosemary to hold the soil in place."

Andras watched, making further changes in his mind. In the hard light of the office, the plans seemed less like a blueprint for a life he desired and more like the blank shape of a client's house. That room need not be called a ballet studio; it was simply a light-filled salon salon. And those two small bedrooms on the main level might not be children's rooms; they could be chambres 2 chambres 2 and and 3 3, to be filled according to the client's whims. The kitchen did not have to contain the imagined remnants of an abandoned meal; the chambre principal chambre principal didn't have to accommodate two Hungarian emigres, or didn't have to accommodate two Hungarian emigres, or anyone in particular. All afternoon he erased and redrew until he believed he had chased the ghosts from the design.

With the rolled-up plans and Lemain's sheets of tracing paper under his arm, he made his way toward the rue des Ecoles through a confetti of dry leaves. The sound of their scrape and crunch against the sidewalk made him think of a thousand autumn afternoons in Konyar and Debrecen and Budapest, the burnt smell of nuts roasting in the street vendor's cast-iron kettle, the stiff gray wool of school uniforms, the flower-sellers'

jars suddenly full of wheat sheaves and velvet-faced sunflowers. He paused at the window of a photographer's studio on the rue des Ecoles, where a new series of portraits had just been displayed: somber Parisian children in peasant clothing posed against a painted harvest backdrop. The children all wore shoes, and the shoes were brilliant with polish. He had to laugh aloud, imagining Tibor and Matyas and himself arrayed in front of a real hay wagon in the clothes they'd worn when they were children: not these impeccable smocks and trousers, but brown workshirts sewn by their mother, hand-medown dungarees, rope belts, caps made from the cloth of their father's disintegrated overcoats. On their feet they would have worn the fine brown dust of Konyar. Their pockets would have been packed with small hard apples, their arms sore from baling hay for the neighboring farmers. From the house would come the rich red smell of chicken paprikas; their father would have sold so much wood for new hay wagons and sheds that they would eat chicken every Friday until winter. It was a good time, that stretch of warm days in October after the hay came in. The air was still soft and fragrant, the pond that would soon be frozen still a bright liquid oval reflecting mill and sky.

In the photographer's window glass, a faint shape passed across the portraits of the children: the flash of a green woolen coat, the gold sheaf of a braid. The reflection crossed the street in his direction. As it approached, its anonymous features knit themselves into a form he knew: Elisabet Morgenstern. She gave him a hard tap on the shoulder and he turned.

"Elisabet," he said. "What are you doing in the Latin Quarter on a Thursday afternoon? Going to meet Paul?"

"No," she said, and gave him her hard stare. "I came to find you." She pulled a tin of pastilles from her bag and shook one into her palm. "I'd offer you one, but I'm almost out."

"What's wrong?" he said, his insides clenching. "Has something happened to your mother?"

Elisabet rolled the pastille around in her mouth. When she spoke, Andras caught a whiff of anise. "I don't want to talk here on the sidewalk," she said. "Can't we go somewhere?"

The Blue Dove was close by, but Andras didn't want to meet his friends. Instead he led her around the corner and up the hill to the Cafe Bedouin, where he and Klara had met for a drink what seemed a lifetime ago. He hadn't been back since that night. The same toothy row of liquor bottles stood behind the bar, and the same faded lilac curtains hung at the windows. They sat down at a table along the banquette and ordered tea.

"What's this about?" he said, once the waiter had left them.

"Whatever you're doing to my mother, you'd better stop," Elisabet said.

"I don't know what you mean. I haven't seen her in weeks."

"That's exactly my point! To put it bluntly, Andras, you're acting like a cad. My mother's been miserable. She hardly eats. She won't listen to music. She sleeps all the time. And she's at me for every little thing. My marks in school aren't high enough, or I'm not doing my chores properly, or I've taken the wrong tone with her."

"And this is somehow my doing?"

"Who else's? You've dropped her entirely. You don't come to the house anymore.

You sent back all her things."

In an instant his grief rushed back as if it had never left him. "What was I supposed to do?" he said. "I stood it as long as I could. She wouldn't write to me or see me. And I did go to her. I went after Rosh Hashanah, when everyone was talking about an evacuation. Mrs. Apfel said your mother wasn't receiving anyone, least of all me.

Even after that, she didn't send word. I had to give it up. I had to respect her wishes. And I had to keep myself from losing my mind, too."

"So you walked away because it was easier for you."

"I didn't walk away, Elisabet. I wrote to her when I sent her things. I told her my feelings were unchanged. She didn't write back. It's clear she doesn't want to see me."

"If that's true, then why is she so unhappy? It's not as though she's seeing someone else. She never goes out. At night she's always home. On Sunday afternoons she lies in bed." The waiter delivered their tea, and Elisabet stirred milk into her cup. "She never gives me a moment alone with Paul. I have to sneak out in the middle of the night to see him."

"Is that what this is about? You can't get a moment alone with Paul?"

She glared at him, her mouth tight with disgust. "You're an ass, do you know that?

A real ass. Despite what you think, I do care how my mother feels. More than you do, apparently."

"I care!" he cried, leaning across the table. "I've been going mad over this. But I can't change her mind for her, Elisabet. I can't make her feel for me what she doesn't feel.

If we're going to speak, she'll have to be the one to contact me."

"But she won't, don't you see? She'll stay miserable. She can keep it up, you know. She's made a project of it all her life. And she'll make me miserable, too." She glanced down at her hand, where Andras noticed for the first time a ring on her fourth finger: a diamond with two leaf-shaped emeralds. As he studied it, she gave the band a contemplative twist.

"Paul and I are engaged," she said. "He wants to take me to New York when I'm finished with school next June."

He raised an eyebrow. "Does your mother know about this?"

"Of course not! You know what she'd say. She wants me to wait until I'm thirty before I look at a man. But I'd think she wouldn't want me to end up like her, alone and old."

"She doesn't want you to end up like her. That's the point! She was too young want you to end up like her. That's the point! She was too young when she had you. She doesn't want you to have to struggle like she did."

"Let me tell you something," Elisabet said, and gave him her granite-hard look. "I would never end up like her. If I got pregnant by some man who didn't love me, I know what I'd do. I know girls who've done it. I'd do what she should have done."

"How can you speak that way?" he said. "She gave up her whole life to raise you."

"That's not my fault," Elisabet said. "And it doesn't mean she can decide what I do once I turn eighteen. I'll marry whomever I want to. I'll go to New York with Paul."

"You're a selfish child, Elisabet."

"Who are you calling selfish?" She narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger at him across the cafe table. "You're the one who dropped her when she got depressed. A person in that state doesn't invite people to lunch or send love notes. But you probably never cared for her at all, did you? You wanted to be her lover, but you didn't really want to know her."

"Of course I did!" he said. "She was the one who pushed me away." But as he said it, he experienced a kind of pressure change, a quiet shock that thrummed in his ears. She had pushed him away, had done it more than once. But he had pushed her away too. At pushed him away, had done it more than once. But he had pushed her away too. At Nice, at the Hotel Taureau d'Or, when she'd seemed on the verge of speaking to him about her past, he'd left her alone at the table rather than hear what she might say. And later that night at the cottage, when he'd demanded she tell him everything, he had done it so roughly he'd frightened her. Then he'd packed her things and driven her back to Paris.

He had tried to see her exactly once since then. He'd written a single postcard and returned her things, then set about erasing her from his mind, his life. Their love would have a neat, sad ending: a box of things dispached, a note unanswered. He would never have to hear the revelations that might hurt him or change the way he thought of her.

Instead he'd chosen to preserve his idea of her--his memory of her small strong body, of the way she listened and spoke to him, of their nights together in his room. As much as he'd told himself he wanted to know everything about her, part of him had retreated in fear. He thought he'd loved her, but what he had loved wasn't all of her--no more than the silvery images on those long-ago cards had been, or her name on an ivory envelope.

"Do you think she'll see me?" he asked Elisabet.

She looked at him for a long moment, a faint wash of relief warming the cold blue pools of her eyes. "Ask her yourself," she said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

An Alley IN THE NINE WEEKS since he'd seen her, time had not lain dormant. The earth had continued its transit around the sun, Germany had marched into the Sudetenland, and change had worked its way into the smaller orbit of his life. There was the raw feeling of wind at the back of his neck; he had cut the hair he'd grown long at her request. His morning tutorials with Vago had ended, and last year's graduates were gone; the new first-year students paid mute attention when he and his classmates gave their critiques in studio. He had mastered the French language, which had crossed the boundary of his unconscious mind and established itself in the territory of his dreams. He had begun his internship at the architecture firm, his first job in his chosen field. And there were new set designs at Forestier's (for Lysistrata Lysistrata, a foreshortened Parthenon and a forest of columnlike phalluses; for The Cherry Orchard The Cherry Orchard, a drawing room whose walls, made of sheer scrim fabric and lined with hidden lights, became increasingly transparent throughout the play until they disappeared to reveal the rows of trees beyond).

Then there was his room on the rue des Ecoles. He had pulled the table into the sloping cave of the eaves, where he could pin plans against the ceiling. He'd gotten a green-shaded lamp to illuminate his work, and had tacked drawings of buildings to the walls--not the ocean liners and icebergs his professors designed, nor the monumental architecture of Paris, but the neat ovoids of Ghanaian huts and the nestlike clusters of American Indian cliff-dwellings and the gold stone walls of Palestine. He'd copied the images from magazines and books, had watercolored them with paints bought cheaply at Nice. On the floor was a thick red rug that smelled of woodsmoke; on the bed, a buttercolored bedspread made from a torn theater curtain. And beside the hearth was a deep low armchair of faded vermilion plush, a reject he'd found one morning on the sidewalk in front of the building. It had been lying facedown in a posture of abject indignity, as though it had tried and failed to stagger home after a night of hard drinking. The chair had a droll companion, a fringed and tufted footstool that resembled a shaggy little dog.

It was in this armchair that Klara sat now. He had written to her, had told her he wanted to see her, had asked for nothing more than her company for an evening. Though he'd told himself not to expect an answer, he hoped Elisabet might prevail upon her to write back. Then tonight he had come home from Forestier's to find her sitting in the chair, her black shoes lined up beside it like a pair of quarter notes. He stood in the doorway and stared, afraid she might be an apparition; she got up and took the bag from his shoulder, slid her arms underneath his coat, held him against her chest. There was her smell of lavender and honey, the bready scent of her skin. The familiarity of it nearly brought him to tears. He put a thumb to the hollow of her throat, touched the amber button of her blouse.

"You've cut your hair," she said.

He nodded, unable to speak.

"And you look thin," she continued. "You look as if you haven't been eating."

"Have you?" he said, and studied her face. The hollows beneath her eyes were shaded violet; the beach gold of her skin had faded to ivory. She looked almost transparent, as if a wind had blown her empty from the inside. She held her body as if every part of it hurt.

"I'm going to make you some tea," he said.

"Don't trouble."

"Believe me, Klara, it's no trouble." He put water on to boil and made tea for both of them. Then he built up the fire and sat down on the fringed footstool. He pushed her skirt up above the knee, unhooked the metal loops of her garters from their rubber nubs, removed her stockings. He didn't caress her legs, though he wanted to; he didn't bury his face in her thighs. Instead he took her feet in his hands and followed their arches with his thumbs.

She let out a cry, a sigh. "Why do you persist with me?" she said. "What is it you want?"

He shook his head. "I don't know, Klara. Maybe just this."

"I've been so unhappy since we came back from Nice," she said. "I could hardly drag myself from bed. I couldn't eat. I couldn't write a letter or mend a dress. When it looked like France might go to war, I had the terrible thought that you might volunteer to fight." She paused and shook her head. "I spent two sleepless nights trying to work up the nerve to come to you, and gave myself such a terrible headache that I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't teach. I've never been too sick to teach, not in fifteen years. Mrs. Apfel had to post a note saying I was ill."

"You told her to send me away if I came to see you."

"I didn't think you'd come except to tell me you were going off to war. I didn't think I could survive that piece of news. And then you sent back my things. God, Andras!

I read your note a hundred times. I made a hundred drafts of a reply and threw them away. Everything I wrote seemed wrong or cowardly."

"And then France didn't go to war after all."

"No. And I was selfishly happy, believe me, even though I knew what it meant for Czechoslovakia."

He smiled sadly. "I didn't really send back all your things, after all. I kept the poem about Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige Anne qui luy jecta de la Neige."

"The Marot."

"Yes. I cut it out of your book."

"You vandalized my book!"

"I'm afraid so."

She shook her head and rested her forehead in her palm, her elbow pillowed on the arm of the chair. "When your letter came this week, my daughter told me she'd lose all respect for me if I didn't go to see you at once." She paused to give him a wry half smile. "At first I was just astonished to learn that she had any respect for me at all. Then I decided I had better come."

"Klara," he said, moving closer and taking her hands in his own. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you the difficult questions now. I have to know what you were thinking when we came back from Nice. You have to tell me about--I don't even know the man's name. Elisabet's father. You have to tell me why you came here to France."

She sighed and looked into the fire, where the heat ran like a volatile liquid through the coals. Her eyes seemed to drink the red light of it. "Elisabet's father," she said, and ran a hand along the velvet arm of the chair. "That man."

And then, though it was already past midnight, she told him her story.

In the second decade of that century, the best ballet students in Budapest had studied under Viktor Vasilievich Romankov, the willful and eccentric third son of a family of penniless Russian aristocrats. In St. Petersburg, when it had still been St.

Petersburg, Romankov had studied at the Imperial School of Ballet and danced in the famous ballet company at the Mariinsky Theater; at thirty-five he left to open his own school, where he taught hundreds of dancers, among them the great Olga Spessivtzeva and Alexandra Danilova. As a young man, he himself had struggled to distill the tincture of precision into his ballet technique; his efforts to demystify the physiology of dance, and the patience he had developed in his own training, had made him an unusually effective teacher. His renown spread west and crossed the Atlantic. When his family lost the last of its once-great fortune in the early rumblings of the revolution, he fled St.

Petersburg, intending to emigrate to Paris along the path traced by his hero Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes. But by the time Romankov reached Budapest he was exhausted and broke. He found himself unexpectedly in love with that city of bridges and parks, of ornately tiled buildings and tree-lined boulevards. Not more than a few days passed before he made inquiries into the Hungarian Royal Ballet; it turned out that its academy had a hopelessly antiquated system of training, and had long been in need of a change. The artistic director of the school knew of Romankov. He was precisely the sort of person the school had wanted to recruit; she was more than happy to have him join the faculty. So there in Budapest he'd stayed.

Klara had been one of his earliest pupils. She had started with him when she was eleven. He had picked her out of a class he'd glimpsed through a window as he walked through the Jewish Quarter; he went straight into the studio, took her by the hand from among her classmates, told the instructress that he was a friend of the family and that there was an urgent matter at home. Outside, he explained to Klara that he was a ballet teacher from St. Petersburg, that he had taken note of her talent and wanted to see her dance. Then he walked her to the Royal Ballet School on Andrassy ut, a third-floor honeycomb of practice studios much shabbier than the school Klara had just left behind.

The floors were gray with age, the pianos scarred, the walls devoid of even a single Degas print, the air redolent of feet and shoe satin and rosin. No classes were meeting that day; the studios stood empty of everything but the strange humming resonance that hovered in rooms whose natural state was to be filled with music and dancers. Romankov took Klara to one of the smaller studios and sat down at the piano. As he pounded out a minuet she danced her butterfly piece from the previous year's recital. The music was wrong but the tempo was right; as she danced, she had the sense that something fateful was taking place. When she'd finished, Romankov clapped his hands and made her take a bow. She was splendid for her age, he said, and not too old for him to correct what was wrong with her technique. She must begin her training immediately; this was the school where she would become a ballerina. He must speak to her parents that very day.

Eleven-year-old Klara, flattered by his vision of her future, took him home to her parents' villa on Benczur utca. In the sitting room with its salmon-colored sofas, Romankov announced to Klara's startled mother that her daughter was wasting her time at the studio on Wesselenyi utca and must enroll at the Royal Ballet School at once. It was possible that Klara had a brilliant future in ballet, but he must undo the damage that her current teacher had done. He showed Mrs. Hasz the mannered curl of Klara's hand, the exaggerated flatness of her fifth position, the jerky exactitude of her port de bras; then he smoothed her hands into a more childlike curl, made her stand in a looser fifth, took her arms by the wrists and floated them through the positions as though through water.