This was how a dancer should look, how she should move. He could train her to do this, was how a dancer should look, how she should move. He could train her to do this, and if she excelled she would have a place in the Royal Ballet.

Klara's mother, who, through an accident of fate and love, had found herself extracted from rural oblivion in Kaba and placed at the center of the most exalted Jewish social circle of Budapest, had never imagined that Klara might someday become a professional dancer; she had imagined lives of ease and comfort for her children. Of course Klara studied ballet, grace being a necessary attribute for young ladies of her social position. But a career as a ballerina was out of the question. She thanked Romankov for his interest and wished him well with his new position at the Royal Ballet School; she would speak to Klara's father that evening. Once she had sent him away she took Klara upstairs to the nursery and explained to her why she could not study ballet with the nice Russian man. Dancing was a pleasant pastime for a child, not something one did in front of audiences for money. Professional dancers led lives of poverty, deprivation, and exploitation. They rarely married, and when they did, their marriages ended unhappily. When Klara was grown she would be a wife and mother. If she wanted to dance she could give balls for her friends, as her anya and apa did.

Klara nodded and agreed, because she loved her mother. But at eleven years old she already knew she would be a dancer. She'd known it since her brother had taken her to see La Cendrillon La Cendrillon at the Operahaz when she was five. The next time her governess at the Operahaz when she was five. The next time her governess dropped her off for a dancing lesson at the school on Wesselenyi utca, she ran the seven blocks to the Royal Ballet School on Andrassy ut and asked one of the dancers there where she might find the tall red-bearded gentleman. The girl took her to a studio at the end of a hallway, where Romankov was just preparing to teach an intermediate lesson.

He didn't seem at all surprised to see Klara; he made a place for her at the practice barre between two other children, and, in his Russian-accented baritone, led them through a series of difficult exercises. At the end of class Klara returned to the other ballet school in time to meet her governess, to whom she mentioned nothing of her adventure. It was three weeks before Klara's parents discovered her defection from the studio on Wesselenyi utca. By then it was too late: Klara had become a devotee of Romankov and the Royal Ballet School. Klara's indulgent father convinced her mother that there could be no real danger of their daughter's ending up on the stage; the school was merely a more rigorous version of the one she'd attended before. He'd inquired into Romankov's professional history, and there could be no denying that the man was an exceptionally gifted teacher. To have his daughter studying under that famous ballet master was an honor that touched Tamas Hasz's sense of bourgeois pride and confirmed his paternal prejudices.

Of the twenty children that comprised the Royal Ballet School's beginning class, seventeen were girls and three were boys. One of the boys was a tall dark-haired child named Sandor Goldstein. He was the son of a carpenter and had a perpetual smell of fresh-cut wood about him. Romankov had discovered Sandor Goldstein not in a dance class but at the pool at Palatinus Strand, where Goldstein had been practicing acrobatic dives with a group of friends. At twelve years old he could do a handstand on the edge of the board and push himself off, then flip backward to enter the water headfirst. At his school he'd won the gymnastics medal three years in a row. When Romankov proposed taking him on as a student, Goldstein had denounced ballet as a pursuit for girls.

Romankov had responded by engaging one of the male dancers of the Hungarian Royal Ballet to meet Goldstein on his way home from school, lift him overhead like a barbell, and run through the streets with him until Goldstein begged to be put down. The next day Goldstein enrolled in Romankov's beginning class, and by the time he was thirteen and Klara twelve, they were both performing children's roles with the Royal Ballet.

To Klara, Sandor was brother, friend, co-conspirator. He taught her to send Romankov into a fury by dancing half a beat behind the music. He introduced her to delicacies she'd never tried: the savory dry end of a Debrecen sausage; the crystalline scrapings of the sugared-nuts kettle, which could be bought for half a filler at the end of the day; the tiny sour apples that were meant for jelly but that made for fine eating if you didn't eat too many. And at the great market on Vamhaz korut he taught her how to steal.

While Klara showed off pirouettes for the candy vendor, Sandor nicked a handful of peach-pit candy for both of them. He tipped tiny Russian dolls into his cap, looped embroidered kerchiefs onto his smallest finger, plucked pastries from the market baskets of women haggling over fruit and vegetables. Klara invited him to lunch at her parents'

house, where he soon became a favorite. Her father talked to him as though he were a full-grown gentleman, her mother fed him pink-iced chocolates, and her brother dressed him in a military jacket and taught him to shoot imaginary Serbs.

When they had both attained the necessary strength, Romankov made Klara and Sandor dancing partners. He taught Sandor to lift Klara with no sign of effort, to make her seem light as a reed. He taught them to become a single dancer in two bodies, to listen to the rhythm of each other's breath, the flow of blood in each other's veins. He made them study anatomy textbooks together and tested them on musculature and bone structure. He took them to see dissections at the medical school. Five times a week they performed with the Royal Ballet. By the time she was thirteen, Klara had been a moth, a sylph, a sugarplum, a member of a swan court, a lady-in-waiting, a mountain stream, a moonbeam, a doe. Her parents had resigned themselves to her appearing on the stage; her growing fame had earned them a certain prestige among their friends. When she turned fourteen and Sandor fifteen they began dancing principal roles, edging out dancers who were four and five years older. Great ballet masters from Paris and Petrograd and London came to see them. They danced for the dispossessed royalty of Europe and for the heirs of French and American fortunes. And amid the confusion of auditions and practices and costume fittings and performances, the inevitable happened: They fell in love.

A year later, in the spring of 1921, it came to the attention of Admiral Miklos Horthy that the star dancers of his kingless kingdom were two Jewish children who had been taught to dance by a White Russian emigre. Of course, no law forbade Jews from becoming dancers; no quota existed in the Royal Ballet Company to mirror the numerus clausus that kept Jews in universities and public positions to a reasonable six percent. But the matter offended Horthy's sense of nationalism. Hungarian Jews might be Magyarized, but they were not really Hungarian. They might participate in the economic and civic life of the country, but they ought not stand as shining examples of Magyar achievement on the stages of the world. And that was what these children had been asked to do; that was why the minister of culture had brought the matter to Horthy's attention. They'd been invited to perform in seventeen cities that spring, and had applied for the necessary visas.

Horthy couldn't be troubled with the matter beyond forming the opinion that something ought to be done. He told the minister of culture to handle it as he saw fit. The minister of culture assigned the problem to an undersecretary who was known for his ambition and his unambiguous feelings toward Jews. This man, Madarasz, lost no time in carrying out his assignment. First he forbade the visa office to grant exit passes to the two dancers. Then he assigned two police officers, known members of the right-wing Arrow Cross Party, to carry out a regular watch over the dancers' comings and goings. Klara and Sandor never guessed that the policemen they saw every night in the alley had anything to do with the troubles they were having at the visa office; the men scarcely seemed to notice them. Usually the policemen were arguing. Invariably they were drunk: They had an army canteen they passed back and forth between them. No matter how late Klara and Sandor stayed at the Operahaz--and sometimes they stayed until twelve thirty or one o'clock, because the theater was the only place where they could be alone--the men were always there. After a week or so of listening to their arguments, Sandor learned their names: Lajos was the tall block-jawed one; Gaspar was the one who looked like a bulldog. Sandor got into the habit of waving to them in greeting. The policemen never waved back, of course; they would give stony stares as Klara and Sandor passed.

A month went by and the men were still there, their presence as much a mystery as ever. But by that time they'd come to seem part of the neighborhood furniture, the fabric of Sandor and Klara's everyday lives. The situation might have gone on indefinitely, or at least until the Ministry of Culture had lost interest, had not the policemen themselves tired of their endless watch. Boredom and drink made their silence oppressive. They started calling out to Klara and Sandor: Hey, lovers. Hey, darlings. How does she taste? Can we have some? Do dancer boys have anything down there? Does he know what to do with it, sugar? Sandor would take Klara's arm and hurry her along, but she could feel him shaking with anger as the men's taunts followed them down the street.

One night the man called Gaspar approached them, stinking of cigarettes and liquor. Klara remembered thinking that the leather strap across his chest looked like the kind of strap teachers used to beat unruly children at school. He drew his baton from its holster and tapped it against his leg.

"What are you waiting for?" the man called Lajos goaded him.

Gaspar took the baton and slipped it under the hem of Klara's dress; in one swift motion he raised the hem as high as her head, exposing her to the waist for an instant.

"There you go," called Gaspar to Lajos. "Now you've seen it."

Before Klara knew what was happening, Sandor had stepped forward and grabbed the free end of the baton; as he tried to twist it away, the officer held fast to the other end.

Sandor kicked the man in the knee, making him howl in pain. The officer wrenched the baton away and struck Sandor in the head. Sandor fell to his knees. He raised his arms, and the officer began to kick him in the stomach. For a moment Klara was caught in a paralysis of horror; she couldn't understand what was happening or why. She screamed for the man to stop, she tried to pull him off Sandor. But the other officer, Lajos, caught her by the arm and wrenched her away. He dragged her into a recess of the alley, where he forced her down onto the paving stones and pushed her skirt up around her waist. He stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth, put a gun under her chin, and did what he did to her.

The pain of it had a kind of clarifying power. She scuttled her fingers across the pavement, looking for what she knew was there: the baton, cold and smooth against the cobblestones. He'd dropped it when he'd bent to unbutton his pants. Now she closed her hand around it and struck him in the temple. When he yelped and put a hand to his head, she kicked him in the chest as hard as she could. He reeled back against the opposite wall of the alcove, hit his head against the base of the wall, and went still. At that moment, from the alley where Sandor and the officer had been struggling, there came a sharp percussive crack. The sound seemed to fly into Klara's brain and explode outward.

Then a terrible silence.

She got to her knees and crawled out of the alcove, toward the place where one male form crouched over another. Sandor lay on his back with his eyes open toward the sky. The bulldog-faced officer knelt beside him, one hand on Sandor's chest. The officer was crying, telling the boy to get up, damn him, get up. He called the boy a rotten piece of filth. His hand came away from Sandor's chest covered in blood. From the pavement he retrieved the gun he'd dropped and turned it upon Klara; its barrel caught the light and quavered in the dim cave of the alley. Klara edged back into the alcove where the first officer lay. She went to her knees, searching for the man's revolver; she'd heard it clatter to the pavement when she'd knocked him away. There it was, cold and heavy on the ground. She picked it up in one hand and tried to hold it still against her leg. The officer who had shot Sandor advanced toward her, weeping. If she hadn't seen him holding the gun a moment earlier, he might have seemed to be approaching her in supplication. Now she looked at Sandor on the ground and felt the weight of the weapon in her own hand, the same gun that the officer called Lajos had pushed against the hollow of her throat.

She raised it and held it steady.

A second explosion. The man stumbled back and fell; afterward, a deep stillness.

It was the ache of the recoil in her shoulder that made her know that it had happened: She had fired the gun, had shot a man. From Andrassy ut came a woman's shout. Farther away, a siren sent up its two-note howl. She came out of the alcove with the gun in her hand and approached the officer she had shot. He had fallen backward onto the pavement, one arm flung over his head. From the alcove came a groan and a word she couldn't understand. The other officer had gotten to his hands and knees. He saw the revolver in her hand and the man dead on the street. In three days he himself would be dead of his head injury, but not before he'd revealed the identity of his partner's killer and his own. The distant sirens grew closer; Klara dropped the gun and ran.

She had killed one officer and fatally wounded another. Those were the facts.

That she had been raped by one of those officers could never be proved in court. All the witnesses were dead, and within days Klara's bruises and abrasions had disappeared. By that time, at the urging of her father's lawyer, she'd been spirited over the border into Austria, and from there into Germany, and from Germany into France. The city of Paris would be her refuge, the famed ballet teacher Olga Nevitskaya, a cousin of Romankov's, her protector. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. She would live at Nevitskaya's only as long as it took her parents to determine who might be bribed, or how her safety might otherwise be guaranteed. But before two weeks had passed, the peril of Klara's situation became clear. She had been accused of murder. The gravity of the crime assured that she would be tried as an adult. Her father's lawyer believed there could be no guarantee of success in an argument of self-defense; the police had determined that the man she'd killed had been unarmed when she'd shot him. Of course he'd had had a gun; he'd a gun; he'd shot Sandor with it a few moments earlier. But the other officer, the one who had witnessed the shooting, had testified that his partner had dropped the gun before he had approached Klara. The testimony had been confirmed by material evidence: the gun had been found beside Sandor's body, ten feet away from the fallen officer.

To make matters worse, it turned out that the man Klara had shot had been a war hero. He had saved fifteen members of his company in the battle of Kovel, had received an official commendation from the Emperor. And if that were not enough to turn any judge's favor against Klara, it emerged--or the police claimed--that the right-wing members of their department had recently received threatening messages from Gesher Zahav, a Zionist organization to which Klara and Sandor had been linked. Three times in the past month the dancers had been seen coming and going from the organization's headquarters on Dohany utca; never mind that what they'd been doing was attending Sunday night dances, not plotting the murder of police operatives. The fact that Klara had disappeared was considered to be a confirmation of her guilt, of her position as an instrument of Gesher Zahav's plot. News of it was all over town; every paper in Budapest had run a front-page article about the young Jewish dancer who had murdered a war hero.

And that was the end of Klara's parents' hopes to bring her home. It was a lucky thing, her father's lawyer wrote, that they'd managed to get her out of the country when they had. If she'd stayed, there would have been another bloodbath.

For the first two months of her time at Madame Nevitskaya's, Klara lay in a tiny dark room that looked out onto an airshaft. Every piece of bad news from Budapest seemed to push her farther toward the bottom of a well. She couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't stand to have anyone touch her. Sandor was dead. She would never see her parents or her brother again. Would never go home to Budapest. Would never again live in a place where everyone she passed on the street spoke Hungarian. Would never skate in the Varosliget or dance on the stage of the Operahaz, would never see any of her friends from school or eat a cone of chestnut paste as she walked the Danube strand on Margaret Island. Would never see any of the pretty things in her room, her leather-bound diaries and Herend vases and embroidered pillows, her Russian nesting dolls, her little menagerie of glass animals. She had even lost her name, would never again be Klara Hasz; she would forever be Claire Morgenstern, a name chosen for her by a lawyer.

Every morning she woke to face the knowledge that it had all really happened, that she was a fugitive here at Madame Nevitskaya's in France. It seemed to have made her physically ill. She spent the first hours of each day hunched over a basin, vomiting and dry-heaving. Every time she stood she thought she would faint. One morning Madame Nevitskaya came into Klara's room and asked a series of mysterious-seeming questions.

Did her breasts hurt? Did the smell of food make her sick? When was the last time she had bled? Later that day a doctor came and performed a painful and humiliating examination, after which he confirmed what Madame Nevitskaya had suspected: Klara was pregnant.

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 Sandor 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 Sandor'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. Sandor'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 Sandor Goldstein.

As her ninth month approached, she began to have vivid dreams about Sandor.

Not the nightmares she'd had in her first weeks in Paris--Sandor 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 Operahaz. 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 Sandor 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 College de France, at its ragged lace collar of clochards.

"Zoltan 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, Zoltan 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 Sandor Goldstein, and you can't love anyone else.

Madame Gerard 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 Sandor," 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, rawlooking 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 You have some too, she'd said, offering the cup. Te 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 Varosliget, the young dancer who had loved Sandor 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 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 Ecoles. In the morning they washed and dressed in the blue chill of Andras's room, and then walked together to the rue de Sevigne. 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.

"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.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

A Dead Man 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'Universite, not ten minutes from the Ecole Speciale. 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 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--"