She laughed and skated ahead of him. In the gray afternoon light, the lake brought to mind the Japanese paintings Andras had seen at the International Exposition; the evergreens spread their dark feathers against a wash of sky, and the hills were like doves huddled together for warmth. Madame Morgenstern moved easily on the ice, her back held straight, her arms rounded, as though this were just another form of ballet. She never stumbled against Andras or leaned on him as they circled the lake; even when she hit a sprig of evergreen and lost her balance, she skipped onto the other blade without a glance at him. But as they cleared the far end of the smaller island a second time, she drifted to his side.

"My brother and I used to skate in Budapest," she said. "We used to go to the Varosliget, not far from our house. You know the beautiful lake there, by the Vajdahunyad Castle?"

"Oh, yes." He'd never been able to afford the entry fee while he'd lived in Budapest, but he and Tibor had gone many times to watch the skaters at night. The castle, an amalgam of a thousand years of architectural styles, had been built for a millennial celebration forty years earlier. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements melted into one another along the length of the building; to walk along that strange facade was to pass through centuries. The castle was lit from below, and there was always music. Now he imagined two children, Madame Morgenstern and her brother-Jozsef Hasz's father?--casting their own dark shadows across the lighter shadow of the castle.

"Was your brother a good skater?" he asked.

Madame Morgenstern laughed and shook her head. "Neither of us was very good, but we had a good time. Sometimes I would invite my friends to come along. We would link hands and my brother would lead us along like a string of wooden ducks. He was ten years older, and far more patient than I would have been." She pressed her lips together as she skated on, tucking her hands into her sleeves. Andras kept close beside her, catching glimpses of her profile beneath the low brim of her hat.

"I can teach you a waltz, if you'd like," he said.

"Oh, no. I can't do anything fancy."

"It's not fancy," he said, and skated ahead to show her the steps. It was a simple waltz he'd learned in Debrecen as a ten-year-old: three strokes forward, a long arc, and a turn; three strokes backward, another arc, another turn. She repeated the steps, following him as he traced them on the ice. Then he turned to face her. Drawing a breath, he put a hand at her waist. Her arm came around him and her gloved hand found his hand. He hummed a few bars of "Brin de Muguet" and led her into the steps. She hesitated at first, particularly at the turns, but soon she was moving as lightly as he might have imagined, her hand firm against his hand. He knew that Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov would have laughed to see him dancing like this in front of everyone, but he didn't care. For a few moments, the length of the song in his head, this light-footed woman in her bellshaped hat was pressed close against him, her hand closed inside his hand. His mouth brushed the brim of her hat, and he tasted a cold damp veil of snowflakes. He could feel her breath against his neck. She glanced up at him and their eyes caught for an instant before he looked away. He reminded himself that anything he felt for her was hopeless; she was an adult woman with a complicated life, a profession, a daughter in high school.

The waltz ended and went silent in his head. He let his arms fall from her body, and she moved away to skate at his side. They skated twice around the island before she spoke again.

"You make me homesick for Hungary," she said. "It's more than sixteen years since I was there. Elisabet's lifetime." She scanned the ice, and Andras followed her gaze.

They could see the green and brown of Elisabet's and Marthe's coats far ahead. Elisabet pointed to something on the shore, the black shape of a dog leaping after a smaller, fleeter shape.

"Sometimes I think I might go back," Madame Morgenstern said in a half whisper. "More often, though, I think I never will."

"You will," Andras said, surprised to find his voice steady. He took her arm, and she didn't pull away. Instead she removed a hand from her coat sleeve and let it rest upon his arm. He shivered, though he could no longer feel the cold. They skated that way in silence for the time it took to circle the islet once more. But then a voice reached them from across the ice, resonant and familiar: It was Madame Gerard, calling his name and Madame Morgenstern's. Andraska. Klarika Andraska. Klarika. The Hungarian diminutives, as though they were all still in Budapest. Madame Gerard came gliding toward them in a new furcollared coat and hat, followed by three other actors from the theater. She and Madame Morgenstern embraced, laughed, remarked on the beauty of the snow and the number of people on the frozen lake.

"Klarika, my dear, I'm very glad to see you. And here's Andraska. And that must be Elisabet up ahead." She smiled slyly and gave Andras a wink, then called Elisabet and Marthe back to the group. When they complained of the cold, she invited everyone for hot chocolate at the cafe. They sat together at a long wooden table and drank chocolate from crockery mugs, and it was easy for Andras to let everyone else talk, to let their conversation join the conversations of other skaters in the crowded warming house. The rising feeling he'd had just before Madame Gerard had arrived had already begun to dissipate; Madame Morgenstern seemed once again impossibly far away.

When they were finished with the chocolate, he retrieved their shoes from the rental desk, and afterward they walked together along the path toward the edge of the Bois. He kept looking for his chance to take Madame Morgenstern's elbow, to let the others go on ahead while the two of them walked behind. Instead it was Marthe who dropped back to walk with Andras. She was purposeful and grim in the deepening cold.

"It's hopeless, you know," she said. "She wants nothing to do with you."

"Who?" Andras said, alarmed to think he'd been so transparent.

"Elisabet! She wants you to stop looking at her all the time. Do you think she likes being looked at by a pathetic Hungarian?"

Andras sighed and glanced up ahead to where Elisabet was now walking with Madame Gerard, her green coat swinging around her legs. She stooped to say something to Madame, who threw her head back and laughed.

"She's not interested in you," Marthe said. "She's already got a boyfriend. So there's no need to come to the house again. And you don't have to waste your time trying to charm her mother."

Andras cleared his throat. "All right," he said. "Well, thank you for telling me."

Marthe gave a businesslike nod. "It's my duty as Elisabet's friend."

And then they had reached the edge of the park, and Madame Morgenstern was beside him again, her sleeve brushing his own. They stood at the entrance to the Metro, the rush of trains echoing below. "Won't you come with us?" she said.

"No, come with us!" Madame Gerard said. "We're taking a cab. We'll drop you at home."

It was cold and growing dark, but Andras couldn't bear the thought of a ride on the crowded Metro with Elisabet and Marthe and Madame Morgenstern. Nor did he want to crowd into a cab with Madame Gerard and the others. He wanted to be alone, to find his way back to his own neighborhood, to lock himself into his room.

"I think I'll walk," he told them.

"But you'll come again for lunch next Sunday," Madame Morgenstern said, looking up at him from under the brim of her hat, her skin still illuminated with the rush of skating. "In fact, we're hoping you'll make a habit of it."

How else could he have replied? "Yes, yes, I'll come," he said.

CHAPTER TEN.

Rue de Sevigne AND SO A NDRAS became a fixture at Sunday lunches on the rue de Sevigne.

Quickly they established a pattern: Andras would come and exchange pleasantries with Madame Morgenstern; Elisabet would sit and scowl at Andras, or make fun of his clothes or his accent; when she failed to whip him up as she'd done at the first lunch, she'd grow bored and go out with Marthe, who had cultivated her own towering scorn for Andras.

Once Elisabet had gone he would sit with Madame Morgenstern and listen to records on the phonograph, or look at art magazines and picture postcards, or read from a book of poetry to practice his French, or talk about his family, his childhood. At times he tried to bring up the subject of her own past--the brother whom she hadn't seen in years, the shadowy events that had resulted in Elisabet's birth and had brought Madame Morgenstern to Paris. But she always managed to evade that line of conversation, turning his careful questions aside like the hands of unwelcome dance partners. And if he blushed when she sat close beside him, or stammered as he tried to respond after she'd paid him a compliment, she gave no sign that she'd noticed.

Before long he knew the precise shape of her fingernails, the cut and fabric of every one of her winter dresses, the pattern of lace at the edges of her pocket handkerchiefs. He knew that she liked pepper on her eggs, that she couldn't tolerate milk, that the heel of the bread was her favorite part. He knew she'd been to Brussels and to Florence (though not with whom); he knew that the bones of her right foot ached when the weather was wet. Her moods were changeable, but she tempered the darker ones by making jokes at her own expense, and playing silly American tunes on the phonograph, and showing Andras droll photos of her youngest students in their dance exhibition costumes. He knew that her favorite ballet was Apollo Apollo, and that her least favorite was La La Sylphide, because it was over-danced and so rarely done with originality. He considered himself shamefully ignorant on the subject of dance, but Madame Morgenstern seemed not to care; she would play ballets on the phonograph and describe what would be happening onstage as the music crested and ebbed, and sometimes she rolled up the sitting-room rug and reproduced the choreography for him in miniature, her skin flushing with pleasure as she danced. In return he would take her on walks around the Marais, narrating the architectural history of the buildings among which she made her life: the sixteenth-century Hotel Carnavalet, with its bas-reliefs of the Four Seasons; the Hotel Amelot de Bisseuil, whose great medusa-headed carriage doors had once opened regularly for Beaumarchais; the Guimard Synagogue on the rue Pavee, with its undulating facade like an open Torah scroll. She wondered aloud how she'd never taken note of those things before. He had pulled away a veil for her, she said, revealed a dimension of her quartier that she would never have discovered otherwise.

Despite the reassurance of the standing invitation, he lived in the fear that one Sunday he'd arrive at Madame Morgenstern's to find another man at the table, some mustachioed captain or tweed-vested doctor or talented Muscovite choreographer--some cultivated forty-year-old with a cultural fluency that Andras could never match, and a knowledge of the things that gentlemen were supposed to know: wines, music, ways to make a woman laugh. But the terrifying rival never appeared, at least not on Sunday afternoons; that fraction of the Morgenstern week seemed to belong to Andras alone.

Outside the household on the rue de Sevigne, life went on as usual--or what had come to seem usual, within the context of his life as a student of architecture in Paris. His model progressed toward completion, its walls already cut from the stiff white pasteboard and ready for assembly. Despite the fact that it was now as large as an overcoat box, he'd begun carrying the model to and from school each day. This was due to a recent spate of vandalism, directed only, it seemed, at the Jewish students of the Ecole Speciale. A thirdyear student named Jean Isenberg had had a set of elaborate blueprints flooded with ink; a fourth-year, Anne-Laure Bauer, had been robbed of her expensive statics textbooks the week before an exam. Andras and his friends had so far escaped unscathed, but Rosen believed it was only a matter of time before one of them became a target. The professors called a general assembly and spoke sternly to the students, promising severe consequences for the perpetrators and imploring anyone with evidence to come forth, but no one volunteered any information. At the Blue Dove, Rosen advanced his own theory.

Several students were known to belong to the Front de la Jeunesse and a group called Le Grand Occident, whose professed nationalism was a thin cover for anti-Semitism.

"That weasel Lemarque is a Jeunesse stooge," Rosen said over his almond biscuits and coffee. "I'd bet he's behind this."

"It can't be Lemarque," Polaner said.

"Why not?"

Polaner flushed slightly, folding his slim white hands in his lap. "He helped me with a project."

"He did, did he?" Rosen said. "Well, I think you'd better watch your back. That little salopard salopard would just as soon slit your throat as bid you bonjour." would just as soon slit your throat as bid you bonjour."

"You won't make friends by setting yourself against everyone," said the politic Ben Yakov, whose chief preoccupation seemed to be to get as many people as possible to admire him, both male and female.

"Who cares?" said Rosen. "This isn't a tea party we're talking about."

Andras quietly agreed with Rosen. He'd had his misgivings about Lemarque ever since the ambiguous incident with Polaner at the beginning of the year. He'd watched Lemarque after that, and had found it impossible to ignore the way Lemarque looked at Polaner, as if there were something compelling and repellent about him at once, or as if his disgust with Polaner gave him a kind of pleasure. Lemarque had a way of sidling up to Polaner, of finding excuses to talk to him in class: Could he borrow Polaner's pantograph? Could he see Polaner's solution to this difficult statics problem? Was this Polaner's scarf that he'd found in the courtyard? Polaner seemed unwilling to consider that Lemarque could have anything but friendly motives. But Andras didn't trust Lemarque, nor the slit-eyed students who sat with him at the student cantina, smoking a German brand of cigarettes and wearing buttoned-up shirts and surplus military jackets, as if they wanted to be ready to fight if called upon. Unlike the other students, they kept their hair clipped close and their boots polished. Andras had heard some people refer to them disparagingly as la garde la garde. And then there were the ones who wore subtler signs of their politics: the ones who seemed to look directly through Andras and Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov, though they passed each other in the halls or in the courtyard every day.

"What we need to do is infiltrate those groups," Rosen said. "The Front de la Jeunesse. The Grand Occident. Go to their meetings, learn what they're planning."

"That's brilliant," Ben Yakov said. "They'll find us out and break our necks."

"What do you think they're planning, anyway?" Polaner said, beginning to grow angry. "It's not as though they're going to mount a pogrom in Paris."

"Why not?" Rosen said. "Do you think they haven't considered it?"

"Can we talk about something else, please?" Ben Yakov said.

Rosen pushed his coffee cup away. "Oh, yes," he said. "Why don't you tell us about your latest conquest? What could possibly be more important or more urgent?"

Ben Yakov laughed off Rosen's slight, which infuriated Rosen all the more. He stood and threw money on the table, then slung his coat over his shoulder and made for the exit. Andras grabbed his own hat and followed; he hated to see a friend leave in anger. He caught up with Rosen on the corner of Saint-Germain and Saint-Jacques, and they stood together on the corner and waited for the light to change.

"You don't think I'm speaking nonsense, do you?" Rosen said, his hands deep in his pockets, his eyes fixed on Andras.

"No," Andras began, trying to find the words in French for what he wanted to say.

"You're just trying to think a few chess moves ahead."

"Oh," said Rosen, brightening. "Are you a chess player?"

"My brothers and I used to play. I wasn't very good. My older brother mastered a book of defenses by a Russian champion. I couldn't do a thing against him."

"Couldn't you read the book yourself?" Rosen said, and grinned.

"Maybe if he hadn't hidden it so well!"

"I suppose that's all I'm doing, then. Trying to find the book."

"You won't have to look very hard," Andras said. "There are posters for those Front de la Jeunesse meetings all over the Latin Quarter."

They had reached the Petit Pont at the foot of rue Saint-Jacques, and they crossed it together in the twilight. The towers of Notre-Dame caught the last rays of the setting sun as they entered the Square Charlemagne and walked toward the cathedral. They stopped to look at the grim saints who flanked the portals, one of whom held his own severed head in his hand.

"Do you know what I want to do when I grow up?" Rosen said.

"No," Andras said. "What?"

"Move to Palestine. Build a temple of Jerusalem stone." He paused and looked at Andras as if daring him to laugh, but Andras wasn't laughing. He was thinking of some photographs of Jerusalem that had been printed in Past and Future Past and Future. The buildings had a kind of geologic permanence, as if they hadn't been made by human hands at all. Even in the black-and-white photos their stones seemed to radiate gold light.

"I want to make a city in the desert," Rosen said. "A new city where an old one used to be. In the shape of the ancient city, but composed of all-knew buildings. Perret's reinforced concrete is perfect for Palestine. Cheap and light, cool in the heat, ready to take on any shape." He seemed to be seeing it in the distance as he spoke, a city in the rippling dunes.

"So you're a dreamer," Andras said. "I never would have guessed."

Rosen smirked and said, "Don't let the others know." They looked up again at the tops of the towers as the line of gold narrowed to a filament. "You'll do it, won't you?" he said. "Come to one of these Jeunesse meetings? Then we'll see what they're plotting."

Andras hesitated. He tried to imagine what Madame Morgenstern might think of an act like that, an infiltration. He envisioned narrating it to her on one of their Sunday afternoons: his daring, his bravery. His foolishness? "And what if someone does recognize us?" he said.

"They won't," Rosen said. "They won't be looking for us among them."

"When do they meet?"

"That's my good man, Levi," Rosen said.

They decided to infiltrate a recruitment session for Le Grand Occident, reasoning that the meeting would be full of unfamiliar faces. It was to take place that Saturday at an assembly hall on rue de l'Universite in Saint-Germain. But first there were the end-ofterm critiques to get through. Andras had finished his Gare d'Orsay at last, staying up two nights straight to do it; on Friday morning it stood white and inviolate on its pasteboard base. He knew it was good work, the product of long study, of many hours of painstaking measurement and construction. Rosen and Ben Yakov and Polaner had put in their time, too, and there on the studio tables stood their ghost-white versions of the Ecole Militaire, the Rotonde de la Villette, and the Theatre de l'Odeon. They were to be evaluated in turn by their peers, by their second-and third-and fourth-year superiors, by their fifth-year studio monitor, Medard, and finally by Vago himself. Andras thought himself seasoned by the relentless friendly criticism of his editor at Past and Future; Past and Future; he'd had some he'd had some critiques earlier that fall, none of them as bad as what his editor had regularly delivered.

But when the critique of his d'Orsay began, the commentary took a savage turn almost at once. His lines were imprecise, his methods of construction amateurish; he had made no attempt whatever to replicate the building's front expanse of glass or to capture what was most striking about the design--the way the Seine, which flowed in front of the station, threw light against its high reflective facade. He'd made a dead model, one fourth-year student said. A shoebox. A coffin. Even Vago, who knew better than anyone how hard Andras had worked, criticized the model's lifelessness. In his paint-flecked work shirt and an incongruously fine vest, he stood over the model and gazed at it with undisguised disappointment. He drew a mechanical pencil from his pocket and tapped its metal end against his lip.

"A dutiful reproduction," he said. "Like a Chopin polonaise played at a student recital. You've hit all the notes, to be sure, but you've done so entirely without artistry."

And that was all. He turned away and moved on to the next model, and Andras fell into an oubliette of humiliation and misery. Vago was right: He had replicated the building without inspiration; how had he ever seen the model otherwise? It was little consolation that the other first-year students fared just as badly. He couldn't believe how confident he'd been half an hour earlier, how certain that everyone in the room would proclaim his work evidence of what a fine architect he would turn out to be.

He knew that the school had a tradition of difficult end-of-term critiques, that few first-year students survived with pride intact. It was the school's version of an initiation ritual, an annealing that prepared the students for the deeper and more subtle humiliations that would occur when the work under discussion was of their own design. But this critique had been much harsher than he'd imagined--and, what was worse, the comments had seemed justified. He'd worked as hard as he could and it hadn't been enough, not nearly, not by miles. And his humiliation was linked, in a way he found it impossible to articulate, to the idea of Madame Morgenstern and his relation to her--as though by building a fine replica of the Gare d'Orsay he might have had greater claim upon her affections. Now he couldn't give her an honest account of the day's events without revealing himself to be a prideful fool. He left the Ecole Speciale in a vile mood, a mood tenacious enough to stay with him through the night and the next morning; it was still with him when he went to meet Rosen for their infiltration.

The meeting hall was just around the corner from the palatial Beaux-Arts, a few blocks east of the Gare d'Orsay. Andras didn't ever want to see that building again. He knew that the critiques he'd received had been accurate; in his zeal to replicate each detail of the building he had failed to grasp its whole, to understand what made the design distinct and alive. This was a classic first-year mistake, Vago had told him on his way out. But if that were the case, why hadn't Vago cautioned him against it when he'd started? Rosen, too, now claimed a towering hatred for the subject of his model, the Ecole Militaire. They scowled at the sidewalk in companionate symmetry as they made their way down the rue de l'Universite.

Since the meeting they were attending was just a recruitment session, there was no need for secrecy or disguise; they arrived with the rest of the attendees, most of whom looked to be students. At a lectern on a low stage at the front of the room, a whip-thin man in an ill-fitting gray suit declared himself to be Monsieur Dupuis, "Secretary to President Pemjean himself," and clapped his hands for order. The gathering fell silent.

Volunteers walked along the aisles, handing out special supplementary sections of a newspaper entitled Le Grand Occident Le Grand Occident. The Secretary to President Pemjean Himself announced that this supplement set forth the beliefs of the organization, which the governing members would now read aloud to the assembly. A half-dozen grim-looking young fellows gathered on the stage, their copies of the supplement in hand. One by one they read that Jews must be removed from positions of influence in France, and that they should cease to exercise authority over Frenchmen; that Jewish organizations in France must be dissolved, because, while masquerading shamelessly as Jewish welfare agencies, they were working to achieve global domination; that the rights of French citizenship must be taken away from all Jews, who must henceforth be regarded as foreigners--even those whose families had been settled in France for generations; and that all Jewish goods and belongings should become the property of the state.

As each of the tenets was read, there were brief cracklings of applause. Some of the assembled men shouted their approval, and others raised their fists. Still others seemed to disagree, and a few began to argue with the supporters.

"What about the Jews whose brothers or fathers died for France in the Great War?" someone shouted from the balcony.

"Those Zionists died for their own glory, not for the glory of France," the Secretary to the President Himself called back. "Israelites can't be trusted to serve France.

They must be forbidden to bear arms."

"Why not let them them die, if someone has to die?" another man called. die, if someone has to die?" another man called.

Rosen curled his hands around the back of the seat in front of him, his knuckles going white. Andras didn't know what he would do if Rosen started shouting.

"You're here because you believe in the need for a pure France, for the France our fathers and grandfathers built," the Secretary to the President continued. "You're here to lend your strength to the cleansing of France. If you're not here for that purpose, please depart. We need only the most patriotic, the most true-hearted among you." The Secretary waited. There was a quiet rumble among the assembly. One of the six young men who had read the tenets shouted, "Vive la France!" "Vive la France!"

"You will become part of an international alliance--" the Secretary began, but his words disappeared under a sudden staccato din, a wooden clapclacking that rendered his words unintelligible. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the noise ceased. The Secretary cleared his throat, straightened his lapels, and began again. "You will become part--"

This time the noise was even louder than before. It came from every part of the hall. Certain members of the audience had gotten to their feet and were spinning wooden noisemakers on sticks. As before, after a few moments of loud hard clatter, they stopped.

"I welcome your enthusiasm, gentlemen," the Secretary continued. "But, if you please, wait until--"

The noise exploded again, and his time it did not cease. The men with noisemakers--there were perhaps twenty or thirty of them among the assembly--pushed into the aisles and spun their instruments as hard and as loud as they could. These were Purim noisemakers, Andras saw now--the wooden graggers used at synagogue during the reading of the story of Esther, whenever the villain Haman's name occurred in the text.

He glanced at Rosen, who had understood, too. The Secretary banged on his lectern. The six grim-faced men onstage stood at attention, as if awaiting an order from the Secretary.

More men pushed out of the rows and into the aisles, bearing large banners that they unrolled and held high so the audience could see them. Ligue Internationale Contre Ligue Internationale Contre l'Antisemitisme, read one. Stop the French Hitlerians Stop the French Hitlerians, said another. Liberte, Egalite, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, read a third. The men holding the banners sent up a cheer, and an angry roar burst from the audience. The thin Secretary to the President flushed a surprising purple.

Rosen let out a whoop and pulled Andras into the aisle, and the two of them helped to hoist one of the banners. One member of the Ligue, a tall broad-shouldered man in a tricolor neckerchief, produced a megaphone and began to shout, "Free men of France!

Don't let these bigots poison your minds!"

The Secretary growled an order at the six stern-faced young men, and in another moment all was chaos in the assembly hall. The seats emptied. Some audience members pulled at the banners, others pursued the men with the noisemakers. The six men who had read the beliefs of the organization went after the man with the megaphone, but other men defended him in a ring as he continued to urge Fraternite! Egalite! Fraternite! Egalite! The Secretary The Secretary disappeared behind a curtain at the back of the stage. Men shoved Andras from behind, kicked at his knees, elbowed him in the chest. Andras wouldn't let go of the banner. He raised the pole high and shouted Stop the French Hitlerians Stop the French Hitlerians. Rosen was no longer at his side; Andras couldn't see him in the crowd. Someone tried to take the banner and Andras wrestled with the man; someone else grabbed him by the collar, and a blow caught him across the jaw. He stumbled against a column, spat blood onto the floor. All around him, men shouted and fought. He shoved his way toward an exit, feeling his teeth with his tongue and wondering if he'd have to see a dentist. In the vestibule he found Rosen grappling with a massive bald man in work overalls. As though he meant to fight Rosen himself, Andras caught him around the waist and wrenched him away, sending Rosen shoulder-first into a wall. The man in overalls, finding his arms empty, charged back into the fray of the auditorium. Andras and Rosen staggered out of the building, past streams of policemen who were rushing up the steps to break up the riot. When they'd gotten clear of the crowd, they tore down the rue de Solferino, all the way to the quai d'Orsay, where they cast themselves down on a pair of benches and lay panting.

"So we weren't the only ones!" Rosen said, touching his ribs with his fingertips.

Andras felt the inside of his lip with his tongue. His cheek still bled where his teeth had cut it, but the teeth were intact. At the sound of quick footsteps he looked up to see three members of the Ligue running down the street, their banners flapping. Other men chased them. Policemen chased the others.