“Klara,” he said. “Klárika.”
She stopped finally, her arms limp at her sides. From around a curve in the road came a sweep of headlights; they splashed across her body as a roadster tore past and shot off toward the center of town, its passengers shouting a song into the night. When it had gone, there was nothing but the thrum and pound of waves. For a long time neither of them spoke. She wouldn’t turn to face him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I left you sitting there.”
“Let’s just go home,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about this on the side of the road.”
“Don’t be angry.”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have brought up the past. It makes me miserable to think of it, and that must have been what made you get up and go down to the beach.”
“It was the absinthe,” he said. “It makes me crazy.”
“It wasn’t the absinthe,” she said.
“Klara, please.”
“I’m cold,” she said, and put her arms around herself. “I want to get back to the house.”
He drove them, feeling no satisfaction in his mastery of the road; when they got out of the car there was no celebration of his skill. Klara went into the yard and sat down in one of the wooden chairs they’d dragged outside. He sat down beside her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did a foolish thing, a selfish thing, leaving you there at the table.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She’d retreated to some distant place of her own, too small to admit him. “It’s been little more than torture for you, hasn’t it?” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“All of it. Our connection. My half-truths. Everything I haven’t told you.”
“Don’t speak in those maddening generalizations,” he said. “What half-truths? Do you mean what happened with Novak? I thought we’d moved past that, Klara. What else do you want to tell me?”
She shook her head. Then she put her hand to her eyes and her shoulders began to shake.
“What’s happened to you?” he said. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t make this happen by walking down to the beach for a smoke.”
“No,” she said, looking up, her eyes lit with tears. “It’s just that I understood something while you were down there.”
“What is it?” he said. “If it has a name, tell me.”
“I ruin things,” she said. “I’m a ruiner. I take what’s good and make it bad. I take what’s bad and make it worse. I did it to my daughter and to Zoltán, and now I’ve done it to you. I saw how unhappy you looked before you left the table.”
“Ah, I see. It’s all your fault. You forced Elisabet to have the problems she’s had. You forced Novak to deceive his wife. You forced me to fall in love with you. The three of us had no part in it at all.”
“You don’t know the half of what I’ve done.”
“Then tell me! What is it? Tell me.”
She shook her head.
“And if you don’t?” he said. He got to his feet and took her by the arm, pulled her up beside him. “How are we supposed to go on? Will you keep me in ignorance? Will I learn the truth someday from your daughter?”
“No,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. “Elisabet doesn’t know.”
“If we’re to be together, I have to know everything. You’ve got to decide, Klara. If you want this to continue, you’ll have to be honest with me.”
“You’re hurting my arm,” she said.
“Who was he? Just tell me his name.”
“Who?”
“That man you loved. Elisabet’s father.”
She yanked her arm away. In the moonlight he could see the fabric of her dress straining against her ribs and going smooth again. Her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t ever grab me like that,” she said, and began to sob. “I want to go home. Please, Andras. I’m sorry. I want to go home to Paris.” She put her arms around herself, shivering as though she’d caught a fever in the cool Mediterranean night. Her starfish pin glittered like a beautiful mistake, a festive scrap torn from an ocean-liner ball, blown across the sea and caught by chance in the dark waves of her hair.
He could see it: She’d been overtaken by something that was like a disease, something that shook her frame and brought a pallor to her skin. He saw it in the way she huddled beneath the blankets in the cottage, the way she stared flat-eyed at the wall. She was serious about going home; she wanted to leave in the morning. For an hour he lay in bed with her, wide awake, until he heard her breath slide into the rhythm of sleep. He didn’t have the heart to be angry at her anymore. If she wanted to go home, he’d take her home. He could gather their things that night and be ready to leave at dawn. Careful not to wake her, he crawled out of bed and began to pack their suitcases. It was good to have something concrete and finite to do. He folded her little things: the cotton dresses, her stockings, her underclothes, her black maillot; he replaced her necklaces and earrings in the satin envelope from which he’d seen her remove them. He tucked her ballet shoes into each other and folded her practice skirts and leotards. Afterward, he put on a jacket and sat alone in the garden. In the weeds beside the driveway, crickets sang a French tune; the song his crickets sang in Konyár had had different high notes, a different rhythm. But the stars overhead were the same. There was the damsel stretched on her rock, and the little bear, and the dragon. He had pointed them out to Klara a few nights earlier; she’d made him repeat them each night until she knew them as well as he did.
They drove back to Paris the next morning. He had helped her get up and dress in the blue morning light; she had wept when she saw he’d packed all their things. “I’ve ruined this holiday for you,” she said. “And today’s your birthday.”
“I don’t care about that,” he said. “Let’s get home. It’s a long drive.”
While she waited in the car he locked the cottage and restored the key to the bird’s nest above the door. For the last time he drove down the winding road toward Nice; the sea glittered as sun began to spill across its pailletted surface. He wasn’t frightened on the road, not after the lessons she’d given him. He drove toward Paris as she sat silently and watched the fields and farms. By the time they’d reached the tangle of streets outside the city, she’d fallen asleep and he had to try to remember how they’d come. The streets had their own ideas; he lost an hour trying to find his way through the suburbs before a policeman directed him to the Porte d’Italie. At last he found his way across the Seine and up the familiar boulevards to the rue de Sévigné. By that time the sun was low in the sky; the dance studio lay in shadow, and the stairs were dark. Klara woke and rubbed her face with her hands. He helped her upstairs and got her into the nightgown she’d forgotten on the bed. She lay on her back and let the tears roll down her temples and onto the pillow.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, sitting beside her. “What do you need?”
“Just to be alone,” she said. “Just to sleep for a while.”
Her tone was strangely flat. This pale woman in the embroidered gown was the ghostly sister of the Klara he knew, the woman who’d raced from her house a week earlier in a duster and driving goggles. It seemed impossible to go home. He didn’t intend to leave her in this fog. Instead he carried her things upstairs from the car, then made her a cup of the linden tea she drank when she had a headache. When he brought it in, she sat up in bed and extended a hand to him. He came to the bed and sat down beside her. She held his eyes with her eyes; a pink flush had spread across her chest. She laid her head on his shoulder and put her arms around his waist. He felt the rise and fall of her chest against his own.