“What’s wrong?” she said. “Look at me.”
He couldn’t. He stripped off his shirt and trousers and crawled into bed, his face to the wall. He heard her moving through the room behind him.
“You can’t do this,” she said. “We’ve got to talk.”
“Go away,” he said.
“This is crazy. You’re acting like a child.”
“Leave me alone, Klara.”
“Not until you talk to me.”
He sat up in bed, his eyes going hot. He wouldn’t cry in front of her. Without a word, he got up and took the letters from his bag and threw them on the table.
“What are those?” she said.
“You tell me.”
She picked up one of the letters. “Where did you get these?”
“Your daughter was kind enough to deliver them. It was her way of thanking me for telling you about Paul.”
“What?”
“She thought I might want to know who else you were fucking.”
“Oh, God!” she cried. “Unbelievable. She did this?”
“‘Your taste is still in my mouth. My hands are full of you. Your scent is everywhere in my house.’” He peeled the letter off the pile and threw it at her. “Or this one: ‘But for you, my life would be darkness.’ Or this: ‘Thoughts of last night have sustained me through this terrible day. When will you come to me again?’ And this one, from two weeks ago: ‘… The Hotel St. Lazare, where I’ll be waiting.’”
“Andras, please-”
“Go to hell, Klara, go to hell! Get out of my house! I can’t look at you.”
“It’s all in the past,” she said. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I never loved him.”
“You were with him for eleven years! You slept with him three nights a week. You left two other lovers for him. You let him buy you an apartment and a studio. And you never loved him? If that’s true, is it supposed to make me feel better?”
“I told you,” she said, her voice flattened with pain. “I told you you didn’t want to know everything about me.”
He couldn’t stand to hear another word. He was exhausted and hungry and depleted, his mind a scorched pot whose contents had burned away to nothing. He almost didn’t care whether there was anything between Klara and Novak still, whether their most recent break was decisive or just one of many temporary breaks. The idea that she’d been with that man, Zoltán Novak, with his odious moustache-that he’d put his hands on her body, on her birthmarks and scars, the terrain that had seemed to belong to Andras alone, but which of course belonged only to Klara, to do with as she wished-he couldn’t stand it. And then there were the others-the dancer, the playwright-and before them there had undoubtedly been others still. They seemed to become real to him all at once, the legions of her former lovers, those men who had preceded him in his knowledge of her. They seemed to crowd the room. He could see them in their ridiculous ballet costumes and their expensive overcoats and their decorated military jackets, with their good haircuts and bad haircuts and dusty or glossy shoes, their proud or defeated-looking shoulders, their grace, their awkwardness, their variously shaped spectacles, their collective smell of leather and shaving soap and Macassar oil and plain masculine desire. Klara Morgenstern: That was what they had in common. Despite what Madame Gérard had told him, he had thought himself unique in her life, without precedent, but the truth was that he was a foot soldier in an army of lovers, and once he’d fallen there would be others to replace him, and others after that. It was too much. He pulled the quilt over his shoulder and put an arm across his eyes. She said his name again in her low familiar voice. He remained silent, and she said it again. He wouldn’t make a sound. After a while he heard her get up and put on her coat, and then he heard the door open and close. On the other side of the wall a pair of new neighbors began to make noisy love. The woman called out in a breathy contralto; the man grunted in basso. Andras ground his face into pillow, wild with grief, thinking of nothing, wishing to God he were dead.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN. The Stone Cottage
BY THE NEXT MORNING he was dizzy with fever. Heat poured out of him and soaked the bed; then he was shaking with chills beneath his blanket and his jacket and his overcoat and three wool sweaters. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t get up for work, couldn’t go to school. When he got thirsty he drank the cold remains of tea straight from the kettle. When he had to piss he used the chamber pot beneath the bed. On the morning of the second day, when Polaner came looking for him, he didn’t have the strength to tell him to leave, though all he wanted was to be alone. Now it was Polaner who stepped into the role of nurse; he did it as though he’d done it all his life. He made Andras get out of bed and wash himself. He emptied the chamber pot, changed Andras’s sheets. He boiled water and brewed strong tea; he sent the concierge for soup and made Andras eat it. When Andras was clean and dressed and lying exhausted on the freshly made bed, Polaner made him tell him exactly what had happened. He took it all in with careful attention, and judged the situation grave, though not hopeless. The important thing now, he said, was for Andras to get well. There were two projects to be finished for studio. If he couldn’t get out of bed and get back to work, Polaner would suffer for it: They were team projects, and he and Andras were the team. Then there were exams to prepare for: statics and history of architecture. They would be given in ten days’ time. If Andras failed, he would lose his scholarship and be sent home. There was also the small matter of Andras’s job. For two days he’d sent no word to Monsieur Forestier.
Polaner said he would gather their things from the studio-Andras was too depleted from the fever to make the trip to the boulevard Raspail-and they would work on their projects all day. In the afternoon Polaner would go to the set-design studio with a note from Andras begging Monsieur Forestier’s pardon. Polaner would offer to do Andras’s copy work that night. In the meantime Andras would lay out a plan of study for the statics and the history exams.
He had never had a friend like Polaner, and would never have a better one as long as he lived. By the next day his job was secure, his final projects on their way to completion. They had to draw plans for a single-use building, a modern concert hall, and there were still problems to solve in the design: They had chosen a cylindrical shape for the exterior, and had to design a ceiling inside that would send the sound toward the audience without echo or distortion. When they were finished with the plans they would have to build a model. Arranging and rearranging cardboard forms consumed an entire day and night. Polaner didn’t mention going home; he slept on the floor, and was there when Andras woke in the morning.
At half past ten, just as Polaner was getting ready to go home, they heard a rising tread on the stairs. It seemed to Andras as if someone were climbing his very spine, toward the black and painful cavern of his heart. They heard a key in the lock, and the door edged open; it was Klara, her eyes dark beneath the brim of her spring hat.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you had company.”
“Monsieur Polaner is on his way home,” Polaner said. “Monsieur Lévi has had enough of me for now. I taxed his brain with architecture all night, though he was still recovering from a fever.”
“A fever?” Klara said. “Has the doctor been here?”
“Polaner’s been taking care of me,” Andras said.
“I’ve been a poor doctor,” Polaner said. “He looks like he’s lost weight. I’ll be off before I do any further damage.” He put on his own spring hat, of such a fashionable shape and color that you could miss the place where he’d resewn the brim to the crown, and he slipped into the hall, closing the door quietly behind him.
“A fever,” Klara said. “Are you feeling better now?”
He didn’t answer. She sat down in the wooden chair and touched the cardboard walls of the concert hall. “I should have told you about Zoltán,” she said. “This was a terrible way for you to find out. And there might have been worse ways. You worked together. Marcelle knew.”