The Ambassador's Daughter

She does not respond but continues walking, shrugging her shoulders in a way that suggests I am welcome to join her. We travel wordlessly along the rue Royale, the swish of her cape giving off a faint hint of lilac perfume.

“Did you come to Paris before the war?” I ask, hoping she will not mind conversation. My breath rises in tiny puffs of frost.

“Yes. There was not so much work for pianists in southern Poland.” She unfurls detail a bit at a time, like a kite string, or thread off a spool. “When the war broke out I found myself stranded here.” There is something deeper beneath the surface, a longing in her voice that belies a part of the story she is not willing to share with me. “But I miss home terribly. Do you?”

“I suppose.” I have not until just this moment thought about it. Our town house in Berlin’s Jewish quarter is not large—even as a child, I could touch both walls of my bedroom at the same time if I stretched my arms out sideways. But it is cozy and made beautiful by all of my mother’s decorations, the floral trim and slipcovers that Papa never would have thought to do himself and that he has left untouched since she died. There’s a tiny garden with a fountain in the back, a park down the road for strolling. It’s been years since we’ve actually lived there for any period of time, though. “We’ve been abroad for so long. Now home is wherever Papa and I land with a place to lay our heads and books to read.”

She smiles. “The vagabond lifestyle.” We reach the steps of the metro, a dark cavernous hole I’ve passed before but never entered. Krysia stops. “Your friends,” she says suddenly. For a moment I am confused. She is referring to my alibi for being out walking, the fact that we’ve long since left the neighborhood I purported to be visiting. “You really were following me.” It is not a question.

“I just …” I falter.

“What is it that you want from me?”

I try to come up with another excuse and then decide to be honest. “Company. I’m bored,” I say, my voice dangerously close to a whine.

Krysia arches an eyebrow. “Bored, in Paris?”

My statement must sound ludicrous. “Not with the city, exactly. It’s all of the parties and silly gossip.”

“So don’t go. Play your own game. No good can come from idleness. Come.”

The metro steps are damp and slick and I take care not to fall as I follow her down. Below, my senses are assaulted by the dank odor of garbage and waste. I avert my eyes from a pair of rats scurrying along the tracks, fighting the urge to yelp. The ground rumbles beneath our feet and a long wooden train rolls into the station, looking not unlike the trolley cars that travel the streets above. The car we board is empty but for an old man sleeping at the other end. It begins to move swiftly through the darkness. I try to act normal, as though accustomed to this strange mode of travel.

“I saw you at the arrival parade for Wilson,” I say, unable to hold back. Krysia stares vaguely over my shoulder and for a minute I doubt my memory, wondering if the woman at the parade had been someone else. “You left in the middle,” I press. The statement comes out abrupt and intrusive.

“I had somewhere to be.” She does not elaborate.

Two stops later the doors open and I follow Krysia back up onto the street, breathing in the fresh air deeply to clear the dankness from my lungs. We are on the Left Bank now, with its narrow, winding streets. This is Paris as I knew it as a girl, buildings leaning close, whispering secrets to one another. Parisians, still in the habit of conserving from the war, have shuttered and darkened their houses and only every other streetlight splutters in an attempt to save electricity. A low fog has rolled in from the river now, swirling eerily around us.

A few minutes later, we reach the boulevard du Montparnasse. The wide avenue is as bright as midday, light spilling forth from beneath the café awnings. A door to a café opens and a woman’s high tinkling laugh cascades over the music. La Closerie des Lilas reads the painted sign on the glass window of the café, smaller print advertising the billiards and rooms available on the floors above.

I follow Krysia inside, where she weaves through a maze of tables without waiting to be seated, steering toward the high mahogany bar with red leather stools. Shelves filled with bottles climb to the ceiling of the mirrored wall behind it. The room is warm and close, plumed with clouds of cigarette smoke. Ragtime music from an unseen gramophone plays lively in the background, mixing with boisterous conversation in French, German and a handful of other languages.

Behind the bar, a skinny brown-haired boy, eighteen or nineteen maybe, with coal-black eyes, stacks beer steins. Feeling his gaze follow me, I flush. I’m still not used to the kind of attention young women receive in Paris, so much more admiring and less veiled than in London or Berlin.

We reach an alcove behind the bar, not quite set off enough from the main part of the café to be its own room, a few tables with an odd assortment of chairs thrown haphazardly around them. A half-decorated Christmas tree lists in the corner.

Krysia pulls up two chairs to one of the tables, where a handful of men are gathered. I await the introductions that do not come, then sit down beside her. The marble table is littered with overflowing ashtrays and empty wine bottles and an untouched carafe of still water. Two candles in a brass dish burn at the center, melting together in a molten pool. The only woman, Krysia looks out of place in this group of rough men. But she chats easily, as if among family. The gathering crackles with conversation. Across from me two men are debating how the war will be remembered in the literature, while to my left there is a lively discussion about the future of Palestine. Ideas rise like champagne bubbles around me and I struggle to keep up, to grasp one before it is displaced by the next

“Is Marcin coming?” one of the men asks in accented French. His sideburns, wide and deep, lash onto his cheeks like daggers. He wears a red silk scarf around his neck, knotted jauntily.

Krysia shakes her head. “He’s playing a wedding at Chartres.”

The man snorts. “That’s a disgrace.”

“One has to eat,” Krysia replies vaguely, then turns to me. “Marcin is my husband.”

“Oh.” Krysia seems so solitary and stoic, an island unto herself. It is hard to imagine her needing or living with anyone.

“He plays cello.”

An older man, fiftyish and portly with a shock of white hair, pads over to the table and places fresh, foaming mugs of beer in front of us. “She’s too modest.” His vowels are rounded, as though his cheeks were full, a Russian accent unmuted by his time in France. “Marcin is one of the foremost cellists in Europe,” the man informs me. He begins twirling a coin between the knuckles of his left hand, index finger, middle, ring, pinky, and then back again without stopping. His fat fingers, each a sizable sausage, are surprisingly nimble. “He should be playing filled concert halls, not background music for wedding guests munching on canapés and cheap wine.”

The red-scarfed man beside me raises his glass. “Hear, hear.” His words are slurred.

Krysia pats the arm of the man who has handed us our drinks. “Margot, this principled fellow is Ignatz Stein.” I am surprised to hear her introduce the barman as a friend. “He owns this place.” I take a sip too large, caught off guard by the full, cold taste of hops, carrying me back to the fields of Bavaria in late harvest when Papa and I hiked there years earlier. The extra liquid spills out of the corner of my mouth. I reach for a napkin and, seeing none, furtively blot at the moisture with my sleeve, hoping no one will notice. Krysia turns to the man seated beside her. “And this is Deo Modigliani.”

“The artist?” I cannot help but blurt out, awestruck. I have studied his work, seen it in the finest galleries and museums. Yet here he is sitting in this nondescript café and drinking beer like everyone else. I’ve heard of this Paris, artists and writers gathering in the Montparnasse cafés to drink and share ideas. It exists beneath the surface, separate and secret from the pomp and formality of the conference and everyday life overhead.

Krysia does not answer but turns her attention to a debate on the future of Alsace-Lorraine that has heated up at the far end of the table. “Surely the territory will be returned to France now.” I have not been introduced to the man who is speaking.

“If the Americans and the French don’t tear one another apart first,” Krysia interjects. I nod. The conference is just days old and things had reportedly gotten quite contentious already.

“But the Americans …”

“It is quite easy to have views from halfway around the globe.” Her observation is unfair and yet at the same time true. The Americans came to help with the fighting and they are here to help make the peace. Yet they will return home, largely unscathed by what is decided here. So why are they at the center of it?

She continues, “If the conference is to be democratic, then why is so much being done by the Big Four behind closed doors? And where is Russia?” I watch in awe as Krysia speaks her mind in a forthright way, mixing logic and passion in the way of a woman long accustomed to debate. Holding court, she appears ethereal, bathed in light. I have seldom heard women offer up opinions and have never seen them received with such respect. There is a keen intensity to the way she speaks, her voice low and melodic and commanding, that makes her somehow beautiful.

“Did you hear a kitchen boy from the Orient sent Wilson a petition for his country’s freedom?” Modigliani offers, changing the subject.

“Ask Margot about it,” Krysia says, gesturing toward me with her head. “I was playing in one of the salons, but she saw the whole thing.”

“You were at the Wilson reception?” The barman, Ignatz, comes up to my chair, regarding me with newfound interest.

“Yes, my father is with the conference.”

“Her father is Friedrich Rosenthal,” Krysia adds with emphasis. Heads nod in recognition.

“Your father doesn’t write under a nom de plume,” Ignatz observes, still twirling a coin.

“No, why should he?”

“I think Ignatz only meant that not every writer has the courage to speak of such things in his own name,” Krysia clarifies. Courage. I recall the news from back home in Berlin, the violence that had erupted as a result of the civil unrest. Politicians has been shot for no more than their views. Could Papa and the other academics be in similar danger?

Modigliani leans in, his artist eyes soulful. “And what are you, ma petite?”

“Deo,” Krysia warns in a low voice, protective like an older sister.

I am uncertain how to answer. “I’m engaged,” I offer. My response is met with blank stares around the table.

“I believe,” Krysia prompts gently, “that he was asking what you are planning to do now that the war is over?” Krysia’s clarification is of little help. Before the war, my future was clear—marriage to Stefan, the biggest question being whether to live with Papa indefinitely or save for an apartment of our own. That world is gone now. But still the old ties and expectations remain.

“I don’t know,” I confess finally. The room is warm and wobbly from the beer.

“How exciting.” I search for sarcasm in her voice and find none. “Starting fresh, reborn out of the ashes. The war was horrible, but it has shaken things up, given each of us a chance to stake a claim for what she wants.”

“They say that Kolchak’s Whites are making gains at Perm …” Ignatz offers, turning the topic to Russia. I sit back, grateful to no longer be the focus. But I find the topic unsettling. Russia has become a wild land since the czar was taken down, his whole family murdered. The Bolsheviks are in charge, or at least most think so—the country has largely been cut off from the West and so only rumors trickle out.