Madame Ben Yakov gave Tibor a fleeting smile. “Ché buon medico siete,” she said. She edged past him and turned on the faucet at the porcelain sink, where she performed the ritual of hand-washing. Tibor watched every movement: the filling of the cup, the removal of her new wedding ring, the passing of water three times over the right hand, three times over the left.
…
After the luncheon there was dancing downstairs in the studio. In observance of Orthodox tradition, the men danced on one side of the room and the women on the other, shielded from each other’s view by a folding screen. Every now and then the men glimpsed the flying hem of a dress or the flash of a hair ribbon; every now and then a woman’s satin shoe came sliding out toward the wall, where the men could witness its suggestion of a woman’s bare foot. The women laughed behind their screen, their feet beating quick rhythmic couplets on the studio floor. But the men were awkward with each other on their side of the screen. No one wanted to dance. It wasn’t until Rosen produced a flask of whiskey from his pocket, and passed its fire around the circle twice, that they began to shuffle in time with the music. Ben Yakov and Rosen linked arms and jostled each other to the right and left. They took each other’s hands and began to spin until they both stumbled. Rosen grabbed Andras’s shoulder, Andras grabbed Polaner’s, Polaner grabbed Ben Yakov’s, Ben Yakov grabbed his father’s, and soon all the men were following each other in a clumsy circle. Ben Yakov and his father broke off into the center of the ring, taking each other by the shoulders; they kicked their heels skyward until their shirttails flew free and their pomaded hair swung loose in waves. Only Tibor stood with his back against the practice barre, watching.
Finally the moment arrived when Madame and Monsieur Ben Yakov would be lifted in chairs and carried around the room. The women emerged from behind their screen to watch; the sight of Klara with her hair fallen from its knot, her dress faintly damp against her breastbone, made Andras lose his breath. For a moment it seemed unfair that this was anyone else’s wedding but their own. Then she caught his eye and smiled, seeming to understand what he was thinking, and there was so much certainty and promise in her look that he couldn’t begrudge Ben Yakov his happiness.
After the wedding, only three days remained of Tibor’s visit. His mood seemed to lighten somewhat; he followed Andras to school and work and earned everyone’s admiration wherever he went. Monsieur Forestier gave him tickets to the shows whose sets he had designed, including Madame Gérard’s Antigone, which Tibor found admirable in every regard with the exception of the lead actress’s performance. Georges Lemain, at the architecture firm, was enthralled by Tibor’s ability to identify any opera by nothing more than a few hummed bars; he treated them to a matinee of La Traviata, and afterward they toured a maison particulier under construction in the Seventeenth, a house Lemain had designed for a Nobel laureate chemist and his family. He showed Tibor the northern-lit laboratory, the library with its ebony bookshelves, the high-ceilinged bedrooms that overlooked a landscaped courtyard. Tibor praised everything in his earnest French, and Lemain promised to design a similar house for him when he was a famous doctor. All through those three days, as Tibor and Andras went from one place to another, one commitment to another, Andras looked for a chance to ask Tibor about Signorina di Sabato, but never found the right moment to introduce the subject. At night, when they might have stayed up late to drink and talk, Tibor claimed exhaustion. Andras lay awake on the mattress on the floor, wondering how to break the fragile cell wall that seemed to separate him from his brother; he had a sense of Tibor hiding behind that translucent membrane as if he were afraid to be seen in sharp focus.
Tibor’s train departed on the night of Klara’s students’ Spectacle d’Hiver. Andras was to take him to the station and then meet Klara afterward at the Théâtre Deux Anges. The prospect of parting made them both quiet on the Métro; as they rode beneath the city, Andras found himself considering the long list of things they hadn’t talked about during the days that had just passed. Now, once again, they would part without knowing when they would see each other next. They hauled Tibor’s things out of the Métro and took them into the station. Once they’d checked the suitcases, they sat down together on a high-backed bench and shared a thermos of coffee. Across the platform stood the locomotive that would pull Tibor’s train to Italy: a giant insect of glossy black steel, its wheel pistons bent like the legs of a grasshopper.
“Listen, brother,” Tibor said, his dark eyes fixed upon the train. “I hope you’ll forgive my behavior at the wedding. It was abominable. I acted dishonorably.”
So here it was, half an hour before his train departed. “What was abominable?”
“You know what I mean. Don’t make me say it.”
“I didn’t see you do anything dishonorable.”
“I couldn’t be happy for them,” he said. “I couldn’t eat that gorgeous cake. I couldn’t bring myself to dance.” He took another breath. “I did an abominable thing, Andras. Not at the wedding. Before.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I did something unforgivable on the train.” He crossed his arms over his chest and lowered his eyes. “I’m ashamed to tell you. It was ungentlemanly. Worse. It was a scoundrel’s move.”
And then he admitted that he’d fallen in love with Ilana di Sabato from the beginning, from the moment he saw her coming across the platform in Florence with her umbrella and her pale green bandbox. There was a little boy with her-her brother, who had come along to help with the suitcases. He had a look of importance about him, Tibor said-importance and great secrecy. But Tibor saw the realization dawning upon him that this wasn’t a game, that his sister was really going to climb aboard a train and go to Paris. The little boy’s face had crumpled. He’d put the suitcase down and sat on it and cried. And Ilana di Sabato sat down with him and explained that it would be all right, that she’d get him to come visit her, that she’d bring her fine new husband home to meet him and the rest of the family. But he mustn’t tell anyone, not for a while yet. You had to see it, Tibor said, how she’d made him understand that.
“I told myself it was natural to feel a certain tenderness for her,” he went on. “She’d been entrusted to my care, and she was entirely without defenses, and she was out in the world for the first time. Everything was new to her. Or not entirely new, because she’d read about it all in books-it was all coming true for her, a world she’d imagined but had never seen. I watched it happen. I was the one she turned to when we crossed the Italian border. It was like watching a person being born. The pain of it, too. I saw her understand she’d left her parents, her family, behind. When she cried after the crossing, I put my arms around her. I did it almost without thinking.” He paused and took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “And she looked up at me, Andras, and by now you’ve guessed it. I kissed her. Not an innocent kiss, I’m afraid. Not a brief one. So you see, I did transgress against your friend. And I transgressed against Ilana. And not just then.” He paused again. “I want to tell you this, because it’s been weighing on me since it happened. I said something to her, here in this station, just before we got off the train.”
“What did you say?”
“I reminded her she still had a choice,” Tibor said. “I told her I’d be happy to take her back to Italy if she changed her mind.” He shook his head and put on his glasses again. “And I confessed myself to her, Andras. Later. I did it the morning we went to see her at Klara’s. When we went to give her that library book.”