“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.”
“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 Andrássy út, 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 Benczúr 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 Wesselényi 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. Hász 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. 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.